Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 220 Seiten: 69-94.

IntroductionIf we were to identify the beginning of the study of visual argumentation, we would have to choose 1996 as the starting point. This was the year that Leo Groarke published “Logic, art and argument” in Informal logic, and it was the year that he and David Birdsell co-edited a special double issue of Argumentation and Advocacy on visual argumentation . Among other papers, the issue included Anthony Blair’s “The possibility and actuality of visual arguments”. It was also the year (...) that Gail J. Chryslee, Sonja K. Foss and Arthur L. Ranney published their short text on “The construction of claims in visual argumentation” , stating that even though theorists may know a great deal about the process of argumentation, “virtually none of this knowledge is applicable to visual argumentation […] because of the properties that distinguish visual imagery from discursive symbols” .Texts on visual rhetoric have been written as far back as the early 1980s, .. (shrink)

Some forms of argumentation are best performed through words. However, there are also some forms of argumentation that may be best presented visually. Thus, this paper examines the virtues of visual argumentation. What makes visual argumentation distinct from verbal argumentation? What aspects of visual argumentation may be considered especially beneficial?

The use of digital presentation tools such as PowerPoint is ubiquitous; however we still do not know much about the persuasiveness of these programs. Examining the use of visual analogy and visual chronology, in particular, this article explores the use of visual argumentation in a Keynote presentation by Al Gore. It illustrates how images function as an integrated part of Gores reasoning.

The article attempts to show some limitations to reductive accounts in science and philosophy of body-mind relations, experience and skill. Extensive literature has developed in analytic philosophy of mind recently due to new technology and theories in the neurosciences. In the sporting sciences, there are also attempts to reduce experiences and skills to biology, mechanics, chemistry and physiology. The article argues there are three fundamental problems for reductive accounts that lead to an explanatory gap between the reduction and the conscious (...) experience. First, reductive accounts deal with objective observations; conscious experiences are subjective. Second, subjective experience seems difficult to identify with physical events described by chemistry, biology, mechanics or neurophysiology. Finally, sport involves knowing how and knowing how is also difficult to reduce to propositional knowledge, which is the reductive scientific/philosophical project. The article argues that sport provides an excellent platform to better understand what is wrong with reductive analysis in body-mind relations, since both conscious experience and knowing how are fundamental to sport performance. (shrink)

The article deals with the following: Three brain imaging studies on athletes are evaluated. What do these neuroscientific studies tell us about the brain and mind of the athlete? Empirical investigations will need a neuro-theory of mind if they are to make the leap from neural activity to the mental. The article looks at such a theory, Gerald Edelman's?Neural Darwinism?. What are the implications of such a theory for sport science and philosophy of sport? The article appreciates some of the (...) neurosciences applications, but questions the hope of giving a complete theory of mind. (shrink)

The use of digital presentation tools such as PowerPoint is ubiquitous; however we still do not know much about the persuasiveness of these programs. Examining the use of visual analogy and visual chronology, in particular, this paper explores the use of visual argumentation in a Keynote presentation by Al Gore. It illustrates how images function as an integrated part of Gores reasoning.

In rhetoric and argumentation research studies of empirical audiences are rare. Most studies are speaker- or text focussed. However, new media and new forms of communication make it harder to distinguish between speaker and audience. The active involvement of users and audiences is more important than ever before. Therefore, this paper argues that rhetorical research should reconsider the understanding, conceptualization and examination of the rhetorical audience. From mostly understanding audiences as theoretical constructions that are examined textually and speculatively, we should (...) give more attention to empirical explorations of actual audiences and users. (shrink)

Farmers are key actors in the transition towards sustainable agricultural practices. Therefore, it is important to understand farmers’ motivations to encourage lasting change. This study investigated how farmers from the two different social contexts of the northeast US and Denmark perceive sustainability. Twenty farmers constructed Fuzzy Cognitive Maps to model their practices and perceived outcomes. The maps were analyzed using social capital as an analytical framework. The results showed that sustainability perceptions differed between US and Danish farmers. Specifically, Danish farmers (...) focused mainly on environmental sustainability while US farmers distributed their focus more evenly across environmental, social, and economic factors. Further, US and Danish farmers had different notions of community engagement. US farmers emphasized the importance of interdependence with their non-farmer community members, where farmers contributed to the wellbeing and livelihoods of non-farmers and vice versa. For Danish farmers, the importance of community engagement lay mainly in localizing food systems, the public image of farming, and the cultural value of farms. Differences in the dominant types of social capital (farmer-to-government vs. farmer-to-non-farmer-community) can explain this pattern. We argue that understanding social capital and primary level of influence can lead to more effective and efficient policies. (shrink)

In an unprecedented situation of uncertainty, the COVID-19 pandemic tested the public crisis communication capacity. Using focus group data, this study analyzes public reactions to COVID-19 policies in Scandinavia. In line with the “rally around the flag” hypothesis, trust in public health authorities remained high in all three Scandinavian countries throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. We asked how people assessed the trustworthiness of authorities, and how they discussed reasons for complying with regulations and recommendations. Our findings suggest that the trustworthiness of (...) experts and leaders was continually negotiated, manufactured, and renegotiated, producing critical and conditional trust. Willingness to and reasons for complying with measures to curb the disease were expressed and justified by participants from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, notwithstanding the national policies consisting of harsh regulations and mild pressure. (shrink)

It is argued that the preservation of truth by an inference relation is of little interest when premiss sets are contradictory. The notion of a level of coherence is introduced and the utility of modal logics in the semantic representation of sets of higher coherence levels is noted. It is shown that this representative role cannot be transferred to first order logic via frame theory since the modal formulae expressing coherence level restrictions are not first order definable. Finally, an inference (...) relation, calledyielding, is introduced which is intermediate between the coherence preservingforcing relation introduced elsewhere by the authors and the coherence destroying, inference relation of classical logic. (shrink)

This essay introduces a special report from The Hastings Center entitled Democracy in Crisis: Civic Learning and the Reconstruction of Common Purpose, which grew out of a project supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. This multiauthored report offers wide‐ranging assessments of increasing polarization and partisanship in American government and politics, and it proposes constructive responses to this in the provision of objective information, institutional reforms in government and the electoral system, and a reexamination of cultural and (...) political values needed if democracy is to function well in a pluralistic and diverse society. The essays in the special report explore the norms of civic learning and institutions, social movements, and communal innovations that can revitalize civic learning in practice. This introductory essay defines and explains the notion of civic learning, which is a lynchpin connecting many of the essays in the report. Civic learning pertains to the ways in which citizens learn about collective social problems and make decisions about them that reflect the duties and responsibilities of citizenship. Such learning can occur in many social settings in everyday life, and it can also be facilitated through participation in the processes of democratic governance on many levels. Civic learning is not doctrinaire and is compatible with a range of public goals and policies. It is an activity that increases what might be called the democratic capability of a people. (shrink)

This chapter describes logic and the significance of punctuation to ‘or’ in a sentence. Axioms are primitive theorems. This is what is meant by ‘logic’, and in particular, a propositional logic is one that can be specified. Deontic logicians are by no means unanimous about their point of formal departure: whether it is the language of ‘ought’ and ‘may’ or the language of ‘obligation’ and ‘permissibility’. The punctuationist account takes ‘or’ as providing punctuation for lists and asks why we should (...) punctuate a list with ‘or’ in certain contexts when we want it to receive a conjunctive reading. ‘Or’ can be replaced by ‘else’ or ‘otherwise’, ‘or’ is a relative adverb as well. ‘Or’ can be regarded as a modifier of a whole sentence. (shrink)

Theorists have oversold the usefulness of predicate logic and generative grammar to the study of language origins. They have searched for models that correspond to semantic properties, such as truth, when what is needed is an empirically testable model of evolution. Such a model is required if we are to explain the origins of linguistic properties by appealing to general properties of linguistic engendering, rather than to the advent of genotypes with the propensity to produce certain brain mechanisms. While the (...) latter sort of explanation has a place, no theory can be considered an `evolutionary' theory without the former. We introduce a general notion of engendering, whose primary virtue is its freedom from assumptions regarding the nature of colloquial change. We use it to frame a conjecture about the evolution of centre embedded clauses; one which makes the fewest possible assumptions about the neural requirements upon individual brains. Keywords: biology of language; epigenesis; engendering; evolution; mutation; population; recursion. (shrink)

This chapter examimes relevance to misunderstandings about the meaning of aut and possible meanings of ‘or’. In spite of what has been said about the notion of form, there is no harm in applying the word ‘formal’ to the Stoics' work. By some standards, it is not informal, and by those standards, we may therefore call it formal where it is the contrast intended. Since the substitution account of validity would not rule out such disjunctions and a descriptive account would, (...) the descriptive account seems on that score to be the more likely candidate for the Stoic conception of validity. Boole also took exclusivity, even the same arity-free idea of exclusivity, to be centrally important to his representation, but the exclusivity was constructed out of a non-exclusive disjunctive use of ‘or’. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate nonnormal modal systems in the vicinity of the Lewis system S1. It might be claimed that Lewis's modal systems are the starting point of modern modal logics. However, our interests in the Lewis systems and their relatives are not historical. They possess certain syntactical features and their frames certain structural properties that are of interest to us. Our starting point is not S1, but a weaker logic S1$^0$. We extend it to S1$^0$D, which can be (...) considered as a deontic counterpart of the alethic S1. Soundness and completeness of these systems are then demonstrated within a prenormal idiom. We conclude with some philosophical remarks on the interpretation of our deontic logic. (shrink)

Contemporary privacy theories and European discussions about data protection employ the notion of ‘personal information’ to designate their areas of concern. The notion of personal information is demarcated from non-personal information—or just information—indicating that we are dealing with a specific kind of information. However, within privacy scholarship the notion of personal information appears undertheorized, rendering the concept somewhat unclear. We argue that in an age of datafication, protection of personal information and privacy is crucial, making the understanding of what is (...) meant by ‘personal information’ more important than ever. To contribute to this aim, we analyse the conception of personal information and its nature, including the distinction between personal and non-personal information from a philosophy of language perspective. Through analyses of aboutness and relative aboutness we point to challenges related to the demarcation between personal and non-personal information, which may in practice lead to all information being personal. (shrink)

This chapter describes the second myth. The second myth can be described as cheerful handmaiden to the first, and, perhaps because of its classical hearkening, has an undeniable charm. Some languages, though English is not one of them, have two different words for two different senses of “or.” The second myth—Latin not only possessed truth-functional vocabulary but also possessed a clearer meaning. The ultimate source of the myth remains a mystery. As with the English ‘or’ the puzzle is not to (...) understand how the conjunctive uses of aut are to be explained in the face of its disjunctive meaning, but how its disjunctive use arises out of a more primitive meaning that is adverbially conjunctive and more or less adversative. Latin, awaits its dissolution, and as we shall see, provides a useful clue. (shrink)

This chapter explains the final account of the origins of disjunction. In Russell's account, “or” corresponds to a state of hesitation. ‘In order to express a hesitation in words, we need “or” or some equivalent word’. His suggestion that ‘or’ represents a state of hesitation takes up in altered form a theme of earlier writers having to do with the character of disjunction in individual as contrasted with general propositions. Grice's genetic speculations about ‘or’ are, like Russell's, part of an (...) attempt to say more generally what the logical particles do in language and thus why they came into it. The final account of the origins of disjunction is, a realization of Wittgenstein's aim, and since it will show how the logical uses of ‘or’ have been sponsored by specific non-logical requirements of linguistic practice. (shrink)

The last chapter shows the use of ‘or’ as an adverb. The discourse-adverbial view invites us rather to think of each clause as formulaically giving permission rather than asserting permissibility. Discourse adverbial uses of ‘or’ may be regarded as the most primitive uses. The invention of logic, or rather the many inventions of logic, for it has been invented many times, has always involved the suspension of some regularities governing the uses of ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’, ‘if, ‘possibly’, and so on (...) in favor of others. Traditional grammar and its late offspring represent one possible way of describing and representing discourse, howsoever fragmentarily. Our understanding of discourse ought to be measured, not in our understanding of that isolated path, but in the multiplicity of other possible paths that we are also capable of recognizing. (shrink)

I argue that the conjunctive distribution of permissibility over or, which is a puzzling feature of free-choice permission is just one instance of a more general class of conjunctive occurrences of the word, and that these conjunctive uses are more directly explicable by the consideration that or is a descendant of oper than by reference to the disjunctive occurrences which logicalist prejudices may tempt us to regard as semantically more fundamental. I offer an account of how the disjunctive uses of (...) or may have come about through an intermediate discourse-adverbial use of or, drawing a parallel with but, which, etymologically, is disjunctive rather than conjunctive and whose conjunctive uses seem to represent just such a discourse-adverbial application. (shrink)

This chapter examines puzzle about the word ‘or’ and some proposed solutions. The theorems of propositional logic are interpreted in such a way as to be provided with an analogous account. The contrast lies in the absence of any such compositional account of ‘or’ and the vocabulary of preference. The distributive puzzle has merely been displaced. We should have to justify the assumption that every list formed with ‘or’ is a disjunctive list. A grammaticological account of distribution over or-lists depends (...) upon our being able to understand the list-containing sentence as a sentence-embedding sentence. Readers have to add a parallel observation about ‘or’. Disjunctive occurrences of ‘or’ as a sentential connective are, if not quite rare, at least not among the commonest uses of ‘or’ in spoken or written English. (shrink)

This paper argues in favor of a hybrid conception of identity. A common conception of identity in datafied society is a split between a digital self and a real self, which has resulted in concepts such as the data double, algorithmic identity, and data shadows. These data-identity metaphors have played a significant role in the conception of informational privacy as control over information—the control of or restricted access to your digital identity. Through analyses of various data-identity metaphors as well as (...) philosophical accounts of identity, we argue in favor of a hybrid conception of identity that emphasizes the relations between the ‘real’ and the ‘digital’. A hybrid conception of identity—where the digital is an aspect on par with social relations, self-understanding, and values—ultimately calls for an understanding of privacy as the right to influence one’s own identity. (shrink)

In [3] I argued for a particular kind of semantics for subjunctive conditionals. The arguments were based upon some linguistic considerations of the general character of what we mean when we say such and such. I urged that a semantics for subjunctive conditionals ought to provide a distinct representation of the subjunctive mood of a sentence, and should take seriously the fact that subjunctive conditionals admit distinctions of tense. The envisaged semantics took the subjunctive conditional to be about occasions, and (...) the central problem discussed was, accordingly, how to represent what must count as the same occasion in spite of whatever changes were required to make the antecedent of the conditional true. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the conceptual orbitings of individuals corresponding to lists of noun phrases formed with ‘or’. We should resist the precept that a set-theoretic union must be contrived for every occurrence of ‘or’ in favour of some discourse-theoretical account that codifies the work that ‘or’ does in the punctuation of speech. A succession of sentences composed with ‘or’ is replaced by a succession of forms containing non-assertive occurrences of those sentences either composed with ‘and’ or as separate acts of (...) speech. The discussion of the behaviour of ‘or’ may be taken up in intensional environments where Quine left the subject of the opacity of certain verbs. The degree of particularity of the intentions is reflected in the particularity with which the dative pronoun will permit existential generalization. (shrink)

I am idebted to members of the Wellington Logic Seminar for useful discussions of work of which this essay forms part, in particular to M. J. Cresswell for comments in the earlier stages of the investigation and to R. I. Goldblatt who suggested the definition ofB infD supu and made numerous other suggestions.