Page 112 - Žagar, Igor Ž. 2021. Four Critical Essays on Argumentation. Ljubljana: Pedagoški inštitut.
P. 112
four critical essays on argumentation
About UVA for women
The claims
First, here is Groarke’s argument(ation) from Informal Logic (1996: 112), and
my counter-argument from the previous chapter.
Groarke’s argument goes as follows:
The black and white photograph [...] presents the university’s
three chief administrators in front of the official entrance to the
university. Especially in poster size, the photograph makes a stark
impression, placing all this confident maleness in front of (visual-
ly blocking) the university’s main entrance. According to the com-
mittee, which commissioned the poster, it is a ‘statement’, which
effectively makes the point that ‘we want more women at our uni-
versity’ and ‘still have a long way to go in this regard’.
And this was my objection:
But, if we are not acquainted with the committee’s ‘statement’
that they want more women at their university (as, I guess, an ‘av-
erage’ Amsterdamer is not), and we just, walking the streets of
Amsterdam, bump into this poster with three corpulent males,
‘stating’ ‘UvA for Women’, it is not at all clear how the poster was
intended to be framed (by its authors). Is it (simply) a bad joke?
Like, these corpulent males looking down on women and explic-
itly mocking them (with an implicitly inverted message like ‘We
don’t need any women at UvA!’). Should it be taken ironically,
maybe cynically, as a meta-statement from somebody who knows
and objects the fact that UvA is all male? There is even a (at least
implicitly) sexist interpretation that all these males at UvA need
more women (but not necessarily for teaching and research ...).
In other words, because of the insufficiently unambiguous framing it is not
at all clear that we (the observers) can (and even should) reconstruct the ar-
gument(ation) in question the way Groarke does:
P
↓
C
where the premise P is the (visual) statement that ‘The University of
Amsterdam’s three chief administrators are all men’ and C is the conclusion
112
About UVA for women
The claims
First, here is Groarke’s argument(ation) from Informal Logic (1996: 112), and
my counter-argument from the previous chapter.
Groarke’s argument goes as follows:
The black and white photograph [...] presents the university’s
three chief administrators in front of the official entrance to the
university. Especially in poster size, the photograph makes a stark
impression, placing all this confident maleness in front of (visual-
ly blocking) the university’s main entrance. According to the com-
mittee, which commissioned the poster, it is a ‘statement’, which
effectively makes the point that ‘we want more women at our uni-
versity’ and ‘still have a long way to go in this regard’.
And this was my objection:
But, if we are not acquainted with the committee’s ‘statement’
that they want more women at their university (as, I guess, an ‘av-
erage’ Amsterdamer is not), and we just, walking the streets of
Amsterdam, bump into this poster with three corpulent males,
‘stating’ ‘UvA for Women’, it is not at all clear how the poster was
intended to be framed (by its authors). Is it (simply) a bad joke?
Like, these corpulent males looking down on women and explic-
itly mocking them (with an implicitly inverted message like ‘We
don’t need any women at UvA!’). Should it be taken ironically,
maybe cynically, as a meta-statement from somebody who knows
and objects the fact that UvA is all male? There is even a (at least
implicitly) sexist interpretation that all these males at UvA need
more women (but not necessarily for teaching and research ...).
In other words, because of the insufficiently unambiguous framing it is not
at all clear that we (the observers) can (and even should) reconstruct the ar-
gument(ation) in question the way Groarke does:
P
↓
C
where the premise P is the (visual) statement that ‘The University of
Amsterdam’s three chief administrators are all men’ and C is the conclusion
112
