Mini Blog Post 3

Enthymemes are rhetorical devices that allow the user to keep one premise implied or hidden. This type of device is often used to influence the audience and allow them to make connections and inferences based on a cultural understanding. Finnegan in the article, “The Naturalistic Enthymeme”, describes the difference between naturalistic and unnaturalistic enthymemes. An important distinction on what a naturalistic enthymeme is made on page 135 saying, “because we perceive photographs as fundamentally ‘realistic’, we make assumptions about their argumentative potential… we assume photographs to be ‘true’ or ‘real’ until we are given reason to doubt them” (Finnegan, 2001). The picture I chose is the famous picture of the sailor and the nurse kissing on V-J Day in 1945. This picture is a great example of an enthymeme because as a viewer, without context, the couple is believed to be in love or at least emotionally involved, but they were strangers celebrating. The unexplained premise of this photo is that the joy of the advancement of the war toward being over is contagious. Since this photo is older, it is a good example of audiences that would have fallen into the belief that this photo is naturalistic since it was before the era of doctored photos.