Mini Blog Post #3

This image of a Covington High School Student staring down and seemingly mocking  Native American activist, Nathan Phillips, went viral earlier this year because of the narrative that it seemed to carry. This picture is a perfect example of a naturalistic enthymeme, because it gives an argument regarding the attitude of American teenagers in the era of Trump. An enthymeme is an argument that has an assumed premise, a naturalistic enthymeme relates to images because the assumed premise is that the images are real in all three parameters of realism as laid out by Don Slater. The first premise this image is that this image is “a representation of something in the world (Finnegan, 143)”; since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, there has been a lot of tension between people of differing political dispositions. This angst caused by the election of Trump makes it reasonable to believe that this apparent harassment is representative of the tension already present. The second premise in this image is that it is “actually occurring before the camera at a particular time or place.” The assumption is simply that what is being seen is actually what was occurring the moment the picture was taken and that the context supports the narrative of the situation. The third and final premise is that the picture was “captured by the camera with not intervention from the photographer.” This is simply an assumption that the photo was not staged and was not photo-shopped. The reason why this image is a perfect example of a naturalistic enthymeme is that when more contextual information surfaced about incident captured on camera, it was shown that the argument being made was based on false premises. The incident portrayed on the camera was not supported by the context of the situation, and therefore, the situation was not a representation of a larger political problem of harassment. In fact, this situation led to another naturalistic enthymeme that assumes the premise that this situation was a representation of the misleading nature of the mainstream media.