Principle of charity <-- learn it.

This is actually 'the first rule of logic' I was asking @kyriacos about as soon as I signed up to steemit and we started debating. He couldn't answer. Nobody can answer the question 'what is the first rule of logic' unless he studied philosophy. You must interpret everything someone says in the most generous way, and only when you've tried your best and still fail to make sense, only then do you conclude they're wrong. At uni they actually deducted points if you failed to do everything you could to interpret an author's argument in the best possible light. In the real world it's even more essential to apply this rule of logic, because people aren't trained to avoid fallacies. So they make arguments that are full of them. But it's your job as a philosopher to reconstruct their argument on their behalf, just like when you're a receptionist at a hotel and a foreigner comes up to the desk and makes a request, you don't play the fool and say "your sentence is not well-constructed, and your tenses are all over the place, therefore I can't help you". A philosopher's job is to search for truth, and sometimes he must look behind the words, behind the fallacy, at the truth hiding in the background. If you don't have the principle of charity guiding your logic, you'll only make a mess. You'll be seeing fallacies everywhere. This is what happens to people who've just started learning formal logic. This is how you can tell someone's an amateur reasoner. Basically, without the principle of charity, what you got is not a philosopher, but a lawyer, or a sophist (which is where lawyers came from I guess).