Page 36 - Gabrijela Kišiček and Igor Ž. Žagar (eds.), What do we know about the world? Rhetorical and argumentative perspectives, Digital Library, Educational Research Institute, Ljubljana 2013
P. 36
What Do We Know about the World?
The argument that established this conclusion compared my photo-
graphs to similar photographs found in encyclopaedia accounts of bread-
fruit. 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 conclusion 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:
I1 + I2
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 which they were compared.
One might compare many other instances of reasoning – identify-
ing a criminal by looking at their “mug shot”; identifying an insect by
comparing it to a preserved specimen; and so on. These are instances of
“visual demonstration” – arguments which prove something by visual-
ly demonstrating that it is so (for a discussion, see Birdsell and Groarke,
2008; Groarke and Tindale, 2013). Other kinds of visual argument oper-
ate in different ways, by invoking visual symbols, metaphors, and so on.
At a time when the development of digital communication is making it
easier to transmit images, sounds, and even physical sensations, it is not
surprising that arguments increasingly incorporate non-verbal elements
that can be communicated in this way. Especially in such a context, rec-
ognizing multi-modal arguments is one way to broaden the scope of our
general account of argument, taking us one step further in the develop-
ment of a thick theory.
The argument that established this conclusion compared my photo-
graphs to similar photographs found in encyclopaedia accounts of bread-
fruit. 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 conclusion 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:
I1 + I2
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 which they were compared.
One might compare many other instances of reasoning – identify-
ing a criminal by looking at their “mug shot”; identifying an insect by
comparing it to a preserved specimen; and so on. These are instances of
“visual demonstration” – arguments which prove something by visual-
ly demonstrating that it is so (for a discussion, see Birdsell and Groarke,
2008; Groarke and Tindale, 2013). Other kinds of visual argument oper-
ate in different ways, by invoking visual symbols, metaphors, and so on.
At a time when the development of digital communication is making it
easier to transmit images, sounds, and even physical sensations, it is not
surprising that arguments increasingly incorporate non-verbal elements
that can be communicated in this way. Especially in such a context, rec-
ognizing multi-modal arguments is one way to broaden the scope of our
general account of argument, taking us one step further in the develop-
ment of a thick theory.
