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What is informal logic, anyway? Philosophy professor emeritus J. Anthony Blair seeks to address this question Wednesday.
While words may elicit mental images, pictures act directly on our sensibilities by actually placing events visually in front of us, as if they were in fact unfolding before our eyes, says Jens Kjeldsen.
This ability to create presence is one of the qualities he will explore in a free public lecture Thursday entitled “Four Rhetorical Potentials of Images.”
A professor of rhetoric at Norway’s University of Bergen and Sweden’s Södertörn University, Kjeldsen is also president of the Rhetoric Society of Europe.
When someone reasons to a conclusion by weighing factors favouring that conclusion against those telling against it, and in the end decides that the pros outweigh the cons, do the cons remain as weighing against the conclusion, thus making the argument weaker than it would have been had there been only the pro factors to consider?
For the last 45 years, Tony Blair has been making the world a better place, one argument at a time.
A professor emeritus in the university’s Philosophy department, Blair is one of the original founders of a school of thought known as informal logic. Simply put, it’s a manner of ordinary reasoning that helps people become more skilled critical thinkers, better able to assess the validity of arguments they’re faced with every day.