One answer:

We do the job in the usual way...obviously!

Okay, but what way is that?

The Holy Trinity:

Linguistic Cues

Context                                Intentions

Linguistic Cues

The classic example of such cues are indicator words and phrases for premises and conclusions (e.g. 'therefore', 'assuming that', etc.). Other conventions of language may be useful in the same way.

As evidence of argumentation such cues are helpful, BUT:

• They aren't conclusive.


• They aren't always present.

Context

We typically approach context in two ways:

1. In terms of exposing students to types of text where argumentation is more likely to occur (e.g. in letters to the editor sections of newspaper or comments sections on blogs).


2. In terms of being able to recognize situations in which argumentation is more likely to occur (e.g. in deliberative settings, or in critical discussions).

Communicative Intent

Where we can attribute an intention to argue to a speaker or a writer we sometimes take this as increasing the likelihood that a given sample of language contains an argument.

Okay, so now that we know what to do,

let's apply our powers of argument identification! 

Ready....?

GO!

Try Another:

Here's a fun one:

How Did You Do?

Probably you feel like you would have no problem at all coming up with arguments--maybe even multiple arguments--for each image.

You probably can.

The question is:

How, exactly, did the Holy Trinity help you do this?

• There were no indicator words, or other sorts of conventional linguistic cues in any of the images.


• Contextual considerations about type of text do not apply, nor is there an identifiable, interpersonal dialectical context in any of these cases.


• In the first and and second images the communicative intention seems fairly clear, but knowing it doesn't help us at all to specify a particular argument. In the third image all we can do is guess when it comes to what the agent's intentions might have been.
  

Another Worry:

So How Did We Do It?

For our purpose, the important observation is that, even assuming we avoided the false positives problem and correctly identified arguments in the samples,

we did not get our argument out of the sample in the standard way.

But So What!?

1. We have the same problems with arguments in natural languages.
   


2. We have other resources to draw on in multi-modal contexts.


3. (This is just code for skepticism about multi-modal arguments, which is clearly wrong-headed.)

A Beginning: Four Temperaments

The Archaeological

The Intutionistic

The Hermeneutic

The Pragmatic

The Archaeologist

The Archaeologist

• believes that arguments are there, in a real sense, because someone in the past intentionally put them there.


• believes that finding arguments is about careful use of the proper tools, procedures and methods.


• is concerned to reconstruct arguments exactly as they were offered, with as little elaboration as possible.
  
  
• tends to work outward from inferential structure.
  


• is concerned with avoiding false positives, e.g. things that might look like arguments but aren't.

The Intuitionist

The Intuitionist

• believes that arguments are there in a real sense, regardless of explicit acts of argument creation.


• believes that finding arguments mostly is a matter of being able intuitively to see that they are there.
  
  
• works from a conception of the argument in its ideal form; of the argument as it should have been given, even if the source did a poor job (or no job at all!) articulating it.
  
  
• trusts in her intuitive faculty to distinguish between false positives and arguments.

The Hermeneut

The Hermeneut

• isn't really interested in whether or not the argument is there, in any real sense.


• doesn't so much identify arguments in passages of text (or images, or music, etc.) as take them to be arguments. Almost anything might be taken to be an argument.
  


• works more from a conception of what interpretations will be fruitful than from fidelity to the source or normative visions of the best version of the source's argument.


• is not concerned at all with false positives, as there are no such things.

The Pragmatist

The Pragmatist

• believes that arguments are there, in some real sense, only when people make (or have made) them.


• takes finding arguments to be a matter of rightly understanding the person who gives them, along both the semantic and pragmatic levels of analysis.
  
  
• works neither from structure, nor ideal form, nor from open-ended interpretation, but from the role the argument plays in its communicative context.
  
  
• is concerned with false positives, as falling into these would indicate a failure to understand the interlocutor.
  

So Who's Right?

Sorry, but I don't have a bloody clue.

We can learn something from each of the four temperaments:

• Archaeologists are right that evidence of some sort of discernible inferential structure is the best indication that an argument may be present.
  
  
• Intuitionists are right to distinguish there being an argument from an argument's actually having been made.


• Hermeneuts have a point that the exercise of interpreting a passage or a multi-modal source as argumentative is (to some degree) a choice that has to be justified.


• Pragmatists are right to think that the argument might only emerge after sufficient understanding of the communicative context.
  

1. Interpretive Justification
   Keeps us hammers from seeing everything  as a nail.
   
   
2. Evidence
   Keeps us grounded in the extant features of the sample before us.
   
   
3. Alternative Readings
   Helps us maintain fallibility in our judgments.
   
   
4. Re-constructability
   Tips us off to how much we are contributing to the product of our analysis.
   
   
5. Attributability
   Keeps us in-bounds with respect to the context in which the sample is found and keeps us alive to the dialectical consequences of our analysis.