Abstract
The chapter investigates the extension of argument into the realm of visual expression. Although images can be influential in affecting attitudes and beliefs it does not follow that such images are arguments. So we should at the outset investigate whether there can be visual arguments. To do so, we need to know what a visual argument would look like if we encountered one. How, if at all, are visual and verbal arguments related? An account of a concept of visual argument serves to establish the possibility that they exist. If they are possible in a non-metaphorical way, are there any visual arguments? Examples show that they do exist: in paintings and sculpture, in print advertisements, in TV commercials and in political cartoons. But visual arguments are not distinct in essence from verbal arguments. The argument is always a propositional entity, merely expressed differently in the two cases. And the effectiveness in much visual persuasion is not due to any arguments conveyed.
Reprinted, with permission, from Argumentation and Advocacy 33 (Summer 1996) (pp. 23–29). I thank an anonymous referee, Leo Groarke and David Birdsell for numerous corrections, constructive criticisms, and suggestions.
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According to Mowat (1965, pp. 356–357), that was one of the navigational methods they used in sailing first from the Outer Islands to Iceland, and later thence to Greenland, and thence to Labrador and Newfoundland.
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This fact makes visual irony more difficult to achieve, or detect, than verbal irony, since irony requires the reversal of surface assertion.
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Thanks for David Birdsell for this formulation.
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Groarke says that these statements are made by the painting, but what the painting actually depicts is the evidence for them.
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Even though the three photos were not initially conceived as a unit, but on different occasions over the past seven years, their grouping here in this special issue of The New Yorker supplies a new context.
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This last point is due to David Birdsell. He recalled a discussion of the effectiveness of Nike’s ads with kids. The point made was that kids don’t think buying Nikes would transform them into Michael Jordans, but they wanted to declare their allegiance. I believe one such discussion occurred in an article devoted to the agency responsible for those Nike adds, that appeared in The New Yorker a few years ago.
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For non-North Americans: Coors and “Bud” (Budweiser) are brands of beer.
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Blair, J.A. (2012). The Possibility and Actuality of Visual Arguments. In: Tindale, C. (eds) Groundwork in the Theory of Argumentation. Argumentation Library, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2363-4_16
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