Enthymeme

Jonathon Delacour’s exposition regarding “the answer” left one commentator wondering what the question was. The entry talks about something that I’ve thought a lot about—the propositional content of images, or word/image combinations. Many critics focus on the idea of images as “subjects” which are then complemented by descriptive predicates. Delacour’s example really demonstrates just why this sort of thinking does not address the nature of images as propositional arguments.

What Jonathon really seems to be after is the “missing premise” of this particular argument. Most advertising is constructed by using a strategy of rhetorical argument known as the enthymeme. Needless to say, there is a lot of scholarship about enthymemes. The simple version is that enthymemes are truncated syllogisms: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Socrates is mortal. The enthymeme follows the same pattern, although it leaves either the major or minor premise unstated.

There is a cultural premise implicit in the images attached to advertising that underwrites the “claim” of the ad. One simple example is found in fashion and cigarette advertising, where a fashionable image is accompanied by a subtle product identification. The major premise is that the people in the advertisement are worth emulating. They use the product. Therefore, the claim is that you should too. All of this is based on the presupposition that some tenuous identification between consumer and consumptive model can be made with the audience. Does buying a product used by a sports figure make the audience more “athletic”? These claims are usually ridiculous at best, and rely on the invisibility of their premises to be effective. Thus, Jonathon’s difficulty in isolating any premise, or in the case of his example, a question which the textual proposition of the sign claims to answer, is understandable.

What I find really interesting about Jonathon’s example is the way that a person can read a variety of polysemous propositions into the “premises” contained within the image—the expanse of sea and sky could be the desolation of human existence, or the infinitude of God. In the first case, it would be a “minor” premise, or perhaps in Toulminan argument, a warrant. In the second case (the reading which Jonathon offers) it would be a form of “backing,” or a major premise overriding all—God is good. The problematic proposition of the girl who seems somewhat aloof in her coupling, Jonathon takes to be the minor premise: “human love is fleeting.” It could also be a major premise—we all want to be loved. The multiple nature of the possible arguments assures a greater “connection”—or buy in—to the implicit premises which are matched with the claim: “Jesus is the answer.”

Advertising works well because we do not examine the premises—we merely connect with them in a nearly unconscious way. It’s reasoning may be weak, but its results are certainly effective. The increasingly “open” nature of advertising messages speaks to a radical increase in visual literacy—the ability to read our cultural aspirations and desires into images—and perhaps a commensurate decrease in our ability to critically understand what we are being sold.

Part of this, I think, is that we are not encouraged to think of pictures as propositions, only as “subjects.”