On Dove, visual evidence and verbal repackaging

2013

2013

2016

In this paper, I defend two skeptical claims regarding current research on visual arguments and I explain how these claims reflect upon past and future research. The first claim is that qualifying an argument as being visual amounts to a category mistake; the second claim is that past analyses of visual arguments fault on both end of the “production line” in that the input is not visual and the output is not an argument. Based on the developed critique, I discuss how the study of images in communicative events can be carried out without the concept of “visual argument” and I illustrate this with two new directions of interdisciplinary research.

This paper concentrates on the (so-called) visual argumentation, more precisely, on the impossibility of (pure) visual argumentation, its very vague methodology and epistemology. Following N. J. Enfield's groundbreaking work The Anatomy of Meaning (2009), I will try to show that: every meaning is composite and context-grounded; every meaning is multimodal; any analysis of meaning should be conducted in terms of enchronic analysis and reconstructed as composite utterances.

The paper discusses Dove’s argument scheme ‘appeal to visual model’ - which is the scheme of an argument of the type: '(As we can see) x in this visual model is F; therefore (the corresponding object) y in reality is G.' Though Dove's scheme is a good starter for analyzing appeals to visual models, it defective in various respects. In particular, it leaves out several necessary premisses and does not explain and justify why such an argument shows what it is supposed to show. Therefore, in the paper's main part, an alternative scheme for appeals to visual models is developed, based on the epistemological approach in argumentation theory. This reconstruction reveals that appeals to visual models, properly understood, are based on the isomorphy relation and that - after filling in the missing but necessary premisses - they are deductively valid.

The final publication is available at Springer via: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10503-016-9411-9., 2017

Visual arguments can seem to require unique, autonomous evaluative norms, since their content seems irreducible to, and incommensurable with, that of verbal arguments. Yet, assertions of the ineffability of the visual, or of visual-verbal incommensurability, seem to preclude counting putatively irreducible visual content as functioning argumentatively. By distinguishing two notions of content, informational and argumentative, I contend that arguments differing in informational content can have equivalent argumentative content, allowing the same argumentative norms to be rightly applied in their evaluation.

2005

In order for visual objects to be fully integrated in argumentation studies, we should be able to show how some visual objects can be part of a rational communication process and be analyzed as part of rational activity, where audiences reason their way to intentions and beliefs via their recognition of the arguer's intention to produce such results. This paper will focus on the way to enable the embedment of some visual objects in argumentation theory.

The final publication is available at link.springer.com. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10503-015-9345-7, 2014

This brief editorial considers a special issue of Argumentation edited by Jens Kjeldsen on visual, multimodal argumentation. It provides a commentary on important advances on interpretative problems such as the propositionality of argument, the reducibility of images to words, whether argument products are primarily cognitive artifacts, and the nature of a modality of argument. Concerning the project of argument appraisal, it considers whether visual arguments call for a revision of our normative, evaluative apparatus.

Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Through the Discipline, 2012

This is the third of three introductions to the book. The first introduction is uploaded as "Theorizing Visual Studies, part one." The second was written by Kristi McGuire; this is the third, which is about the possibility that images can produce or embody arguments--that they can theorize, that they can drive arguments and not just exemplify, illustrate, or serve as memory aids. It's a promise visual studies has often made.