The Münchausen Effect and the post-truth era advertising messages: critical analysis on fallacious and enthymematic advertising slogan argumentation

Humans have always been prone to adorning the truth and to producing twisted fallacious arguments in order to sketch a truth (i.e., their own truth) that best suited their interest at a certain time, within certain circumstances. Even more, the communication climate of nowadays has moved from face-to-face communication - that offered a limited kit of means to mold the truth - towards the emerging technology mediated virtual communication that enhances the dressing up and the re-shaping of truth to make the message more appealing to its target public to such an extent that truth loses its substance and may turn into its opposite. Advertising messaging exhibits some contradictory characteristics that are involved in producing what we call and aim at coining here as the Műnchausen Effect. Our research findings have shown that all of the 100 taglines on bestslogans.com relied on enthymematic argumentation and where erroneous in terms of content, all as non sequitur fallacies. However, due to the ambiguity brought about by their elliptical structure (as all of them lacked the conclusion and at least one of the premises), these implicit arguments have proved hard to analyze with regard to the specific kind of fallacies that could hide beyond the missing premise(s), as one could imagine any kind of missing premise(s), where there is an elliptical structure of argumentation. This difficulty that is encountered leaves room to another kind of approach to research in communication, the quantum approach that in critical thinking may have to do with informal logic, and that takes into account creativity and the Umberto Eco idea of opera aperta. We may dwell on such an approach in a further study

The Digital World – Essence and Dualism

This text (a part of a Doctoral Thesis development in progress) is focused on the recent challenges before philosophy, based on the necessity to synchronize our contemporary concepts with the latest outcomes in the studies of the Digital World. The key perspective is grounded on what R. Descartes and G. F. Leibniz foresaw centuries ago. The standpoint is physicalist and the analysis considers: the human Binary Approach and Binary System, the ontological aspects of the computer programming languages, and the philosophy within the hardware and software correlation.Този текст (част от докторска дисертация в развитие) се фокусира върху съвременните предизвикателства пред философията, в процеса на синхронизиране на концепциите с бурно развиващите се изследвания на дигиталния свят. Отправна точка са вижданията на Р. Декарт и Г. Лайбниц, заявени преди векове, но валидни в значителна степен и днес. Коментарът е от позиция на физикалиста, а анализът включва човешкия бинарен подход, онтологичните аспекти на компютърните програмни езици, както и философията във взаимоотношенията хардуер-софтуер

Metaphors in Digital Hermeneutics: Zooming through Literary, Didactic and Historical Representations of Imaginary and Existing Cities

The paper proposes to bridge two areas of inquiry, digital hermeneutics and metaphor within a digital environment, by the analysis of a less studied phenomenon, i.e. how interpretation is supported and shaped by metaphors embedded in an interface. The study is articulated around three use cases for literary, didactic and historical representations of imaginary and existing cities based on a model (z-text) and interface (Z-editor) for zoomable texts. We will try to demonstrate that the zooming and contextualization features of the tool allow creating layers of meaning that can assist interpretation and critical readings of literature and history