Blogging Pedagogy - logos

The Rhetorical Implications of a Lightning Bug: Making and Adapting Arguments in Visual Rhetoric

Deb Streusand — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 05:00:00 +0000

Author:

Deb Streusand

Image Credit:

Adapted by Deb Streusand from "Cookie" by Sonoftroll

As part of the rhetorical analysis unit in my Rhetoric and Writing class, I created a lesson that, because I like terrible puns, I called "The Logos of Logos." My goal was to introduce the students to the idea of visual rhetoric, with an emphasis on drawing out implied arguments from images. I've written this experience up as a blog rather than a lesson plan because I find what happened in the classroom far more interesting than my original lesson plan. I'll first lay out the progress of the original lesson plan, then describe how I adapted it on the fly due to having more time than I expected, and the intriguing conversation that followed.

I began by showing the students the Walmart smiley face logo:

walmart%20logo%20smiley%20face.jpg

Image credit: personal.psu.edu/tqs5262/blogs

I asked them to point out the premises and conclusion of the argument it makes, which they did ably: shopping at Walmart makes you happy, you want to be happy, therefore you should shop at Walmart.

Next, we looked at two video advertisements depicting the smiley logo in different guises.

The first advertisement added a construction helmet to the smiley, paired it with the slogan "working hard to save you money," and showed him using a saw to cut back the prices on Walmart signs:

WalMart - Smiley TV Commercial

Video of WalMart - Smiley TV Commercial

The students quickly identified the appeal to ethos the ad created by suggesting that Walmart works hard to save you money. They discussed how this appeal to ethos became one of the premises of a logical enthymeme when combined with an implied premise about the audience: Walmart saves you money, you want to save money, therefore you want to shop at Walmart. At this point, I was already wondering how I'd fill up the rest of the class period, because the students were picking up on the arguments much more quickly than I'd expected.

They were equally adept at analyzing the next video, which featured a leather-gloved, bow-tied smiley firing lasers at the pricing signs:

WalMart - Smiley TV Commercial

Video of WalMart - Smiley TV Commercial

I asked them: "what associations does our culture have with leather gloves and lasers?" "It's badass!" cried a student. Another pointed out that this was an appeal to pathos as well as to ethos: you want to be badass, so shop at Walmart.

This was 20 minutes into a 75-minute class, and I had only one more trick up my sleeve:

walmart-high-cost-of-low-price.jpg

Image credit: chicshadesofgreen.com

Not only did the students rapidly dissect the effects of pairing the slogan with the smiley face image, but they noted something I hadn't caught: the addition of slanted eyebrows to make the smiley face look more sinister. Already, they were better at analyzing visual rhetoric than I was. We were at the 30 minute mark. What to do?

Inspiration! Since they were so good at analyzing the arguments the logos made in their original and adapted versions, why not have them adapt a corporate logo themselves? I asked them to get on the computers, find a corporate logo of their own, and decide how they would adapt it to make a different argument. They had about 15 minutes to work and the remaining class time to go around and present their choices. Since I came up with this assignment on the spot, and I didn't know their level of Photoshop expertise, I didn't require them to make an actual image adapting the logo, but merely to decide and explain how they would adapt it. After each student described his or her adaptation of the logo, I would ask the class to deduce the argument that student was trying to make, and the student would confirm or correct the class's suggestions.

Lots of delightful images, both theoretical and actual, emerged from this assignment -- one of my favorites was an evil version of the Twitter bird, intended to imply that Twitter will ruin your reputation. The most interesting discussion, however, came out of a student's use of Photoshop to adapt the logo of a local cookie store by adding a bug. I've made my own version of this logo for a fictional cookie store:

Modified Cookie Logo.png

The student's original image added a fly, which the class easily identified as creating an argument that implied the store was dirty. One student asked, "what would happen if you put a butterfly by the logo instead?" This question launched an impassioned discussion about the rhetorical implications of different types of bugs. "A butterfly is beautiful! That would create a positive image for the store!" "But it's still weird to have a bug by cookie..." The general consensus was that the butterfly's connotation was positive, though with some lingering dissenters. Then a student, my usual gadfly, smiled mischieviously. "How about a lightning bug?" The students went wild with laughter and then with discussion. They never did agree on exactly what the lightning bug would mean, but they were as excited about rhetoric as they'd been all semester. I left the classroom happy, and I think they did too.

Using Mind Maps to Analyze and Assess Reasoning

Battistelli — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 18:15:53 +0000

Author:

Todd Battistelli

Image Credit:

Grumpyyoungman01

Chris Ortiz y Prentice raises an interesting question in “Why we just can’t seem to teach logos.” As Chris says, analysis challenges both instructors and students as we struggle to understand the multi-faceted Greek term “logos.” Given rhetoric’s long and at times contentious relationship with formal logic, I agree that we should take a broader approach to the analysis of reasoning in persuasive texts. As for practical classroom activities, I think one answer, which bears some correspondence to the interactive fiction technology Chris discusses, is the use of argument mapping to describe and assess reasoning.

At the outset I want to distinguish mind mapping or concept mapping from the mapping of argumentation. Mind maps diagram a wide variety of information and ideas: from non-linear brainstorming to more hierarchal outlining to rhizomatic relationships. Argumentation mapping has a narrower focus. It attempts to translate text-based arguments into various argument schemata including, but not limited to, formal logic, as described by Tim van Gelder.

While mind mapping has found favorable use in the writing classroom, more focused argumentation mapping software has gone unnoticed in rhetoric and writing (even as it receives attention in the fields of argumentation theory, informal logic, computer science, and business communication). Given the Toulmin model diagrams that appear in our writing textbooks and the other schemata we use to conceptualize logos, I think argumentation mapping could serve the writing classroom well.

However, I can't simply point out a tool that instructors can neatly plunk down into their own classroom practice for two connected reasons. First, the software available is limited in function for writing instruction purposes. Second, these limitations result from contested understandings of logos.

Rhetoric and writing is rightly cautious about the application of formal logic in rhetorical arguments. We do not resolve our civic debates through appeals to universally agreed premises, because such premises do not exist. Any attempt to locate and work from such premises inevitably excludes perspectives that belong in public discussions, as the variations of lived experience are stripped away in favor of clear and distinct perceptions.

The process of reasoning, though, can be conceived in ways different than the construction of logically sound syllogisms. In The Rhetoric of Reason James Crosswhite says, “The capacity for reason lies not in an independent rational mind but at least partly in the deep competences people have to be members of social groups that disclose the world and interpret things in a shared way” (43).

These competencies have their own patterns that diagramming can capture. One productive and long-standing rhetorical schema is that of stasis theory. Stasis, as described in Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee's Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students demonstrates how interlocutors do or do not converge on a common question to debate.

Stasis evokes spatial metaphors with its sense of a standpoint from which people pursue a line of reasoning. This visualization in turn lends itself to mapping where users can demonstrate the convergence or divergence of viewpoints. Unreasonable rhetors under the stasis theory model are not illogical; they are unreasonable because they do not engage the reasoning offered by their fellow discussants. Software that helps students create stasis maps could highlight not only breakdowns in communication but also directions in which discussants would need to move in order to regain stasis.

As I said above, no current software is especially well-suited to using such schemata. Philosophy Professor Maralee Harrell reviews several programs in "Using Argument Diagramming Software in the Classroom" [pdf copy], but finds that most are not adaptable enough for classroom use. Even in the context of philosophy courses where the study of formal logic has more relevance than it does in rhetoric, Harrell finds that most of the software currently available limited in terms of the flexibility of map organization or doesn't allow for on-the-fly classroom demonstration that can draw on student participation.

As most argument mapping programs employ schemata that are too close to formal logical syllogisms, one option is to adapt mind mapping software to provide more freedom in designing maps, but this comes with the trade-off of losing the guided template designs that help students construct maps that describe stasis, fair summary, and other elements of persuasive interaction. The interactive dimension is key, as argumentation is a participatory activity. Per Crosswhite's definition, we cannot assess the reasonableness of arguments in isolation but only in the way they work together to create community.

The underlying structure of mind maps presents central ideas with sub-units branching off and connecting. You can describe complex interrelationships in a mind map, but I'm not sure how well the mind map structure can capture the diachronic and interactive dimensions of argumentation that involves two or more interlocutors. Discussants exchange viewpoints over time, and each proffered argument shapes the others that later respond. Perhaps a map with animation, three dimensions and the capacity to zoom to different levels of detail as with Prezi could address these needs.

While such complexity might assist in crafting maps with a high level of fidelility to the argumentative landscape they represent, it isn't needed to assist students and instructors with more limited analyses of reasoning. More limited maps can evaluate whether sources are in stasis, whether they fairly represent the different positions at play, and can describe other aspects of the dialectical relationship between viewpoints in order to show the extent to which they abide by the competencies of reason.

Why We Just Can't Seem to Teach Logos

Prentice — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:56:01 +0000

Author:

Chris Ortiz y Prentice

Image Credit:

Amy Zhang

When it comes to argumentation, what's the hardest subject to teach: pathos, ethos, or logos? Based on my experiences teaching RHE306 and RHE309K and from asking my colleagues this question over the past two years, I believe the answer is indisputably LOGOS.

What's so hard about teaching logos? I think the big reason is that, when you're talking about persuasion and then you introduce the word “logos,” students' brains immediately recall the word “logic.” Instructors hesitate to allow this understanding. Many, including myself, dispute it outright.

When and where I went to college, logic was a vestigial subject, at least so far as the humanities were concerned. You could take “Symbolic Logic” from the Philosophy Department (cross-listed as a mathematics course), and a number of courses in logic were offered by the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

It didn't use to be this way: in the past, Aristotelian logic was viewed as an elementary education for the liberal arts. But with the ascendancy of Analytic Philosophy in the early parts of the twentieth century – largely as a result of the work of Gottlob Frege on predicate logic – logic's disciplinary ties with rhetoric were severed. In English-speaking universities today, logic is more likely taught as a highly-specific and technical field more closely aligned with mathematics than with Rhetoric or English. Search the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for “logic” to see the proof of this historical change.

If students think logic when I say “logos,” this is a big problem because, first off, I know that I don't really know anything about logic, properly speaking; and second off, what the students call logic isn’t really logic, either. In any event, I’ve never had a student with any training in logic. My sense is that students use the term to mean something like “indisputable reasoning.”

But herein lies the final confusion that, I would wager, makes teaching logos so hard for us rhetoric instructors, and not just for me. The rise of Analytic Philosophy was accompanied, in the elite philosophy departments where these sorts of things go down, by the downfall of positivism. Wittgenstein was refuting his own Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus – widely considered the state-of-the-art in predicate logic – as early as the mid-1930s. Around the same time, Alfred North Whitehead, co-author with Bertrand Russell of the Principia Mathematica (1910-13), had not only given up logic altogether but, like Wittgenstein, had undergone a conversion and would next appear on the philosophical stage as a profound anti-positivist in Process and Reality (1929).

So much for logic. It really exists. Computer programmers use it. And that’s all I can tell you. But what about logos?

While philosophers of the Anglophone academy were relegating logic to mathematics departments, Continental philosophers were spending the half-century explicitly critiquing the whole notion of reasoning. As those of us educated under the post-structuralist hegemony know so well, “logos” becomes a primary site for deconstruction. If I can’t understand “logos” as a persuasive technique it’s no doubt because the whole thrust of my education has been underwritten by its deconstruction.

At this point, the conversation veers into the philosophical quagmire of relativism. Without muddying the waters, I suggest that logos is hard to teach simply because we do not know what it is. As a term, it is hopelessly overdetermined. As a technique, it is – perhaps regrettably -- foreign to our education. And then we’re trying to teach it to nineteen-year-olds, who have all too much faith in sense-making as it is.

That's my diagnosis: as for curative measures, I'm afraid I'm at a loss. As close as I can come to this daunting subject is "affordance," for which the times and its technologies have better prepared me and my students.