Page 140 - Žagar, Igor Ž. 2021. Four Critical Essays on Argumentation. Ljubljana: Pedagoški inštitut.
P. 140
four critical essays on argumentation
The argument that established this conclusion compared my photo-
graphs to similar photographs found in encyclopaedia accounts of breadfruit.
One might summarize the reasoning as: ‘The fruit is breadfruit, for these
photographs are like standard photographs of breadfruit.’ But this is just
a verbal paraphrase. The actual reasoning—what convinces one of the con-
clusion—is the seeing of the sets of photographs in question. Using a variant
of standard diagram techniques for argument analysis, we might map the
structure of the argument as:
I +I
⇓
C
where C is the conclusion that the fruit is a piece of breadfruit, I1 is the set
of photographs I took, and I2 is the iconic photographs of breadfruit to whi
ch they were compared.’
But should (and does) the reasoning really consist just of ‘the seeing of
the sets of photographs in question’? Is just seeing and visually comparing
photographs from different sources really enough for a reasoned, justified
conclusion (in question)?
In order to answer these questions, I replicate Groarke’s procedure and
prove that his breadfruit is not really a breadfruit, but much less exotic fruit
(Maclura pomifera).
What can we learn from this? Above all that sayings like: ‘A picture
tells a thousand words’ should be indeed taken seriously. But, to be (abso-
lutely) sure which of these thousand words refer to that particular picture,
we have in front of us in these particular circumstances, we have to cut
down (on) those words considerably. On the other hand, without any words
at all, we can hardly identify the exact meaning of the picture.
In other words, there seem to be no pure visual arguments (as there
are, probably, very few purely verbal arguments; if any at all), and instead
of visual argumentation (or purely verbal argumentation, for that matter
we should be talking about multimodal argumentation and multimodal
meaning (combining, in our case, at least visual and verbal, but other semi-
otic modes are involved as well, such as gesture and gaze). But multimod-
al meaning and multimodal argumentation require different analytical
140
The argument that established this conclusion compared my photo-
graphs to similar photographs found in encyclopaedia accounts of breadfruit.
One might summarize the reasoning as: ‘The fruit is breadfruit, for these
photographs are like standard photographs of breadfruit.’ But this is just
a verbal paraphrase. The actual reasoning—what convinces one of the con-
clusion—is the seeing of the sets of photographs in question. Using a variant
of standard diagram techniques for argument analysis, we might map the
structure of the argument as:
I +I
⇓
C
where C is the conclusion that the fruit is a piece of breadfruit, I1 is the set
of photographs I took, and I2 is the iconic photographs of breadfruit to whi
ch they were compared.’
But should (and does) the reasoning really consist just of ‘the seeing of
the sets of photographs in question’? Is just seeing and visually comparing
photographs from different sources really enough for a reasoned, justified
conclusion (in question)?
In order to answer these questions, I replicate Groarke’s procedure and
prove that his breadfruit is not really a breadfruit, but much less exotic fruit
(Maclura pomifera).
What can we learn from this? Above all that sayings like: ‘A picture
tells a thousand words’ should be indeed taken seriously. But, to be (abso-
lutely) sure which of these thousand words refer to that particular picture,
we have in front of us in these particular circumstances, we have to cut
down (on) those words considerably. On the other hand, without any words
at all, we can hardly identify the exact meaning of the picture.
In other words, there seem to be no pure visual arguments (as there
are, probably, very few purely verbal arguments; if any at all), and instead
of visual argumentation (or purely verbal argumentation, for that matter
we should be talking about multimodal argumentation and multimodal
meaning (combining, in our case, at least visual and verbal, but other semi-
otic modes are involved as well, such as gesture and gaze). But multimod-
al meaning and multimodal argumentation require different analytical
140
