Visual Argumentation

This essay analyzes the riot kiss photograph tacken by Rich Lam after game seven of the 2011 Stanley Cup Finals in Vancouver and its subsequent life as a visual internet meme. Noting how this image and its reproductions both operated as memes, I argue that the riot kiss photograph's rapid circulation across numerous participatory sites exposed the diverse argument frames employed to create arguments about this image and simultaneously marked the ambiguity of commonplace readings. Public recognition of such instability motivated the continued invention of arguments about this image through reproduction and creative manipulation, ¡dissect the various claims fashioned about the original photograph and the ways in which the ambiguity of the frameworks for those claims motivated the creative manipulation of the photograph. This essay contributes to argumentation theory by offering an opening foray into understanding memes as forms of visual argument.

This essay analyzes three highly-contested, sacred spaces: Fetterman Battlefield, Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, and Haymarket Square. Each was consecrated by the blood o f the fallen, each was marked with a monument enshrining a particular narrative o f its history, and each has been the site o f sustained argument over who should be remembered. Therefore, each enables us to explore the visual argumentation o f monuments, the functions o f argument in sacred space, the use o f sacred space to expand communal boundaries, the relation between mourning and blood consecration, and the ways in which visual argument may open, or close, consideration o f who is deemed human and worthy o f remembrance. By focusing on attempts to rebut specific arguments made by existing monuments, we uncover the possibilities o f memory technologies designed to correct, expand upon, or contradict previous monuments. We reveal oppositional memory practices by demon­ strating how public arguments, made on/with particular sacred spaces and in particular times, evolve. M onuments' attempts to stabilize particular histories can be refuted in diverse ways, including: interpretive plaques that access counterhistories and punctuate a space with interruptions; subsequent counter-monuments that " answer back " to the original; and even destruction and/or replacement. Our examples demonstrate that, often, monuments' arguments are answered by expanding the lives that count as griev able, thereby opening spaces in which public grief may be made more inclusive. K ey W ords: visual argument, m em ory, oppositional m em ory practice, grievability, Fetterm an Battlefield, Little Bighorn Battlefield National M onum ent, H aym arket Square On a windswept hill in Wyoming, a cairn lamenting that " there were no survivors " now stands corrected by historical plaques recognizing 1,500 Indian survivors. On the high plains of eastern Montana, a sea of white marble tombstones now is interspersed with red granite warrior markers. In bustling Chicago, a tall, bronze police officer, removed from his original location, loses a century-long standoff with a nearby sculpture of Justice placing a wreath on a fallen laborer. The monuments that occupy sacred sites make arguments about who is worthy of mourning, honor, and remembrance. The monuments themselves endure, but their arguments often are controversial and judgments of worthiness have proven far less permanent. In his influential work, The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade (1959) offered an understanding of the sacred that still resonates within scholarship of sacred space. The sacred, he wrote, " reveals absolute reality and at the same time makes orientation possible; hence it founds the world in the sense that it fixes the limits and establishes the order of the world " (p. 31). Nowhere are these functions more apparent than in sacred spaces: spaces set apart from their surroundings, ritually dedicated to the memory of a particular event, hero, or victim, and frequently adorned with enduring markers—often for those who lost their lives there-that offer seemingly eternal narratives of origin and orientation (Foote, 2003, p. 8). By enshrining particular narratives on a sacred site, monuments suggest what is worthy of

In 1909, at the height of the woman suffrage controversy and during the golden age of postcards, the Dunston-Weiler Lithograph Company of New York produced a twelve-card set of full-color lithographic cartoon postcards opposing woman suffrage. The postcard images reflect, and depart from, verbal arguments concerning woman suffrage prevalent during this period. They reflect arguments against suffrage that highlighted the coarsening effect the vote would have on women. The postcards also present an argument that was absent in the verbal discourse surrounding suffrage: that men (and the nation) would become feminized by woman suffrage. Accordingly, these postcards offer a productive location in which to explore how the icons of the Madonna and Uncle Sam, as well as non-iconic images of women, were deployed to reiterate the disciplinary norms of the ideographs of <woman> and <man>.

"This chapter examines how pictorial argumentation advertising is performed through visual tropes and figures. It argues that rhetorical tropes and figures are an essential way of creating visual argumentation.

Argumentation is just one dimension of the rhetoric of pictures. I have suggested in other works that pictorial rhetoric is characterized by four specific visual qualities: the power to create presence (evidentia), immediacy in perception, realism and indexical documentation, and finally semantic condensation. The semantic condensation can be both emotional (evoking emotions) and rational (evoking arguments and reasoning).

Rational condensation in pictures is the visual counterpart of verbal argumentation. However, whereas verbal argumentation rely on temporal and sequential representations based on linguistic syntactic rules; most pictorial argumentation – I suggest – is performed through visual tropes and figures. Visual metaphors, metonymies, synecdoches and contrasts are among the most common kinds of visual argumentation.

Through analyses of a selection of commercial advertisements, the chapter illustrates how this kind of tropological visual argumentation is created and how it works."

This article explores the concepts of critical questions (from D. N. Walton, 1996)
and integrative and refutational argument stratagems as an approach for teaching
argumentation and critical thinking. A study was conducted for 6 months in
3 sections of a 7th-grade social studies classroom in which 30 students discussed
and wrote about current events. One section served as a comparison group. Over
time the experimental group made more arguments that integrated both sides of
each issue. Collectively, the experimental group also successfully constructed salient
critical questions, particularly in regard to weighing values and designing practical
creative solutions. In-depth analysis of 1 student showed how conceptual structures
and argument practices improved incrementally over time and how the appropriation
of stratagems may have been facilitated by the dialectical nature of the intervention
(e.g., using critical questions and stratagems successfully in discourse). The theoretical
and practical importance of Walton’s dialogue theory, and the critical question
approach to argumentation, are discussed.
Th

To help visual studies (and multimodal studies with a visual component) mature into a serious humanities discipline, it is crucial to be able to unveil patterns in the way visuals can communicate. Finding patterns requires first of all that it should be possible to identify recurring “building blocks” in visuals. Only if any recurring elements are found, it is sensible to ask whether any “rules” or “conventions” exist that prescribe how these elements can interact to create meaning – and how they cannot. In this chapter it is argued that since traffic signs constitute coded information, it is possible to use and adapt traffic signs' templates as a kind of visual "speech acts" to convey novel meanings, whose interpretation is steered and constrained by this speech act character.
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This essay theorizes the unnaturalistic enthymeme, an emergent argument formation surrounding analogico-digital photography. Instead of presuming the naturalism of images, we contend that contemporary audiences have a heightened awareness of the ways that digital photography is altered. Drawing on the quadripartita ratio, or four categories of change associated with rhetorical figuration, we explore a series of image controversies that denaturalize assumptions about photographic realism. We examine how contemporary protesters respond to this shift in interpretive conventions by making the unnaturalistic enthymeme visible through culture jamming commercial billboards. The unnaturalistic enthymeme does not supplant the naturalistic enthymeme, but instead enables a “hypersophistic” attitude in visual culture—one that decides the veridicality of photographs through argument instead of assumptions about technological objectivity.

This study examined a new prewriting tool, argumentation vee diagrams (AVDs), which are used to write
reflective opinion essays. AVDs are based on the theoretical concept of argument– counterargument
integration, which involves evaluating and integrating both sides of an issue before developing a final
conclusion on a controversial question. In a test of the effectiveness of AVDs, 45 undergraduates at a
large, southwestern university were randomly assigned to an experimental or control group. Both groups
wrote 4 opinion essays over a 4-week period. The experimental group also received training on using the
AVDs, including instruction on criteria for weighing arguments. Results indicated that AVD training was
effective in enhancing argument– counterargument integration. Furthermore, examination of integration
strategies used by participants revealed a new strategy, minimization, which was not previously part of
E. M. Nussbaum and G. Schraw’s (2007) argument– counterargument integration framework. Minimization
involves curtailing the importance or extensiveness of a problem or advantage as a heuristic
shortcut for weighing advantages and disadvantages. The role of critical questions and argumentation
schemata in argument-counterargument integration is discussed.

gabor@fi lozofi a.bme.hu The paper seeks to show that the theory of strategic maneuvering, the most recent version of the pragma-dialectical approach to argumentation, can make vital contribution to understanding how commercials are designed and defended against legal challenges. If commercials can be subjected to argumentation-theoretic analysis, that would also show that the idea that commercials never constitute genuine arguments is mistaken. We will begin by sketching the pragma-dialectical approach and the theory of strategic maneuvering, then we apply the latter to two cases: the argument in a commercial aiming to persuade customers that Dove Intensive Cream moisturizes better than Nivea's similar product, and the argument given by Dove's manufacturer, Unilever, during the proceedings conducted by the Hungarian Competition Authority, which is intended to convince the Authority that the commercial is not deceptive.

ABSTRACT: Is visual argumentation possible? My personal opinion is that it is, despite of the burden of verbal argumentation and the numerous critiques made against visual arguments. Insofar as most of these critiques are related to the difference between words and images, I will focus my paper on this issue, which is a theoretical one, as it seems to me that taking these critiques seriously is a first step before analyzing concretely how visual arguments work.

["Visiones". Visual tools in ancient and contemporary forensic oratory] Since the end of the last century, many scholars have studied the capability of visual languages and images themselves to "argue". Visual argumentation is deeply rooted in Greek and Roman rhetoric, which already distinguished between the use of real visual tools and the use of words for producing images and suggestions. Today, it is more than ever necessary to establish a balanced relationship between images and words, as the ancient rhetoricians already prescribed. Although it is not easy to reconstruct a continuity between ancient and modern rhetorical techniques, comparing them to each other is a possible and useful exercise.

Purpose: This paper analyzes the PowerPoint handouts of 22 engineering
undergraduate students to establish criteria for judging the persuasive
capabilities of the students’ visual argument in handouts that are expanded
versions of PowerPoint slides used for presentations. Specific guidelines on
how to create effective visual arguments are useful as slides meant for
presentations cannot be used handouts.
Method: The criteria were derived primarily from Doumont’s (2002) three
laws of professional communication that suggest how to combine rhetorical
and visual elements to form coherent arguments.
Results: The results show that Doumont’s laws are able to judge the
persuasiveness of the students’ visual arguments. In addition, the
weaknesses in the students’ visual argument applied to all three laws, which
is in line with Doumont’s view that the laws have an order of precedence.
Conclusion: The guidelines in this paper could help practitioners convert their slides into handouts more effectively and encourage teachers to spend
more time in teaching visual argument in the classroom.

This study focuses on the iconographic channel of the graphic novel as a particular occurrence of silence. In Comics, images provide not only the data required for the development of narration; they also render available the concrete circumstances of the enunciation and often orient the reader towards the identification of language in action, or towards the selection of a particular communicative intention, a process which coincides with Saville-Troike's silences carrying illocutionary force and perlocutionary effect (1985), or with Kurzon's silencesintentional signifiers alternating with an utterable signified. Through the analysis of concrete scenes taken from three graphic novels dealing with sociopolitical contexts of conflict -Satrapi's Persepolis , Folman and Polonsky's Waltz with Bashir (2009) and Sacco's Palestine (2007)we identify two different sets of arguments: (1) semi-silent arguments resulting from the interplay between verbal and visual language & (2) silent arguments emerging within an entirely visual, extra-linguistic scene, where images alone regulate the quantity or the quality of information given at a certain point of narration with the aim of leading the addressee to a certain tacit conclusion.

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.

John Grierson’s classic definition of documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality” emphasizes both the genre’s indexical link to reality and the maker’s perspective on this reality. In recent times, a substantial number of so-called “interactive” documentaries has seen the light of day. In this paper, one dimension of such online documentaries, namely the freedom of users to access content via different paths of navigation as well as to skip material, is discussed from the perspective that a documentary, in a necessarily subjective way, attempts to convince the viewer of something. Interactivity limits the maker’s opportunities to do so.

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.

Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees often use savvy media operations to counter its negative image. In June of 2013, TSA began using the social network Instagram to share photos with the public. Most of the photos shared on TSA’s Instagram feed depict potentially dangerous items (guns, knives, grenades) TSA agents have confiscated at airport security checkpoints. In this essay, I argue that TSA’s use of images of potentially dangerous objects on Instagram functions as a visual enthymeme that justifies the existence of TSA, given the context of constant criticism TSA faces. This essay uses existing literature on visual enthymemes and Roland Barthes’s punctum to examine the ways TSA’s images depict airports as vulnerable and wounded by these dangerous objects.

In this article, I argue that when officeholders try to avoid blame, they often engage in defensive performances which can be analysed in terms of how they exploit various multimodal semiotic resources to ward off (potential) criticism: the setting, appearance, and manner chosen for a particular interaction with an audience; and both verbal and non-verbal ways of arguing, legitimising, framing, and representing social actors and actions.

I apply these analytic categories to interpret the data gathered during fieldwork at a major training event of British government communicators. By combining insights from multimodal discourse analysis, discourse-historical studies of organisational behaviour, and recent research into blame avoidance in public administration, I demonstrate how certain semiotic strategies used by officeholders have an effect of backgrounding the ideas about any possible norm violations that government communicators may have been associated with in the eyes of critical audiences, such as lying, spin doctoring, and using tax money for propaganda campaigns that may not actually serve the interests of the public.

I suggest that analysts of government communication should pay more attention to the defensive practices of government insiders, and study in great detail how these practices are incorporated into everyday behaviour through professional training.

In this paper the role of images in argumentative settings is analyzed from a cognitive angle. In particular, the proposal of this paper is to see visual argumentation as a specific form of extended and distributed cognition. In order to develop this idea, some of Wittgenstein’s insights are used to put evidence produced by research on temporal-spatial reasoning processes into philosophical perspective. Some contemporary argumentative analyses of visual argumentation are also discussed using commercial and political examples. The paper finishes with the notion of collective minds in order to specify the general idea of arguing with images as extended cognition.

La cultura giuridica contemporanea (intendendo con questo termine sia la filosofia del diritto, sia la dottrina che riflette sul diritto positivo), in diversi casi si è concentrata sul contributo che il portato teorico delle neuroscienze può precisare rispetto al nostro modo di pensare la categoria del giuridico. Molti studi si sono soffermati su questioni legate ad alcuni temi fondanti del pensiero filosofico e giuridico occidentale, quali il libero arbitrio e le determinanti delle scelte individuali, collegandole agli assunti che lo studio scientifico-biologico del cervello ha introdotto nelle filosofie speciali della mente e del diritto. Altri accostamenti, specificamente filosofico-giuridici, di dottrina processualistica o legati al pensiero criminologico, hanno invece evidenziato il ruolo che il paradigma neuroscientifico può e potrà ricoprire in sede processuale (peritale), specie in ambito penalistico. Rispetto a quest'ultimo nodo teorico, una possibile riflessione che pertiene al filosofo del diritto il quale voglia ricomprendere il campo giuridico nell'ambito delle discipline umanistiche, riguarda l'utilizzo retorico dell'immagine neuroscientifica (neuroimaging), sia a livello processuale, sia per ciò che concerne il discorso filosofico e dottrinale.

À partir des travaux de Jean-Marie Klinkenberg visant à rapprocher la rhétorique de l’argumentation et la rhétorique des figures, cet article a pour objet l’argumentativité des figures. Il met en question l’idée suivant laquelle les figures de rhétorique, envisagées sous l’angle de l’argumentation, auraient seulement une fonction persuasive. S’il en était ainsi, l’argumentation visuelle n’aurait pas sa place à côté d’une rhétorique visuelle. Deux conceptions distinctes de la métonymie sont ainsi contrastées afin de montrer que si, dans certains cas, il est indéniable que la métonymie visuelle peut avoir une fonction persuasive (notamment en publicité), dans d’autres, en revanche (par exemple dans les gravures et les affiches contre la guerre), elle a bel et bien une fonction argumentative, en donnant des raisons pour soutenir ou critiquer un point de vue, ce qui justifie l’existence d’une argumentation visuelle à part entière

Naked Politics: Nudity, Political Action, and the Rhetoric of the Body by Brett Lunceford, examines the rhetorical power of the unclothed body as it relates to protest and political action. This study explores what the disrobed body communicates, and how others are invited to make sense of this display. The actions examined range from grassroots protests to those of professionalized social movement organizations. Specifically, Lunceford examines PETA and the use of chained women and the Running of the Nudes; lactivists, or women engaging in public breastfeeding as protest action in both online and physical space; the World Naked Bike Ride’s worldwide protest against oil dependency and attempt to raise awareness of the vulnerability of cyclists; and a contest held on College Humor that invited women to write their preferred presidential candidate on their exposed breasts and send the picture to them to post on the site. Although these actions may seem to have little in common beyond their use of body exposure, they all share the notions that something can happen when you take your clothes off and that the act of disrobing can have social and political consequences. Moreover, these groups illustrate the often paradoxical views of the exposed body—by both the participants and the observers—and how such bodies operate in the public sphere. Even when the voice is silent, the body still speaks; Naked Politics considers what is being said.

In this chapter, we argue that certain salient contrasts that Frederick Wiseman presents nonverbally and multimodally in his Direct Cinema documentaries can be understood as antitheses that play an argumentative role. In this type of documentary, which renounces the use of voice-over narration and music, a filmmaker has to rely on cinematography and editing in combination with participants' spoken language, to guide viewers' interpretations. We argue that the ways in which certain sequences and shots are filmed and edited as well as the way dialogue, image, and sound combine within the shot create multimodal meanings that can be accounted for in terms of antithesis and can thereby contribute to the argument developed by the filmmaker. We focus on instances of visual and multimodal antithesis in five of Wiseman's early films (Titicut Follies, High School, Hospital, Juvenile Court, and Primate) and one later film (Zoo).

The penitentiary offers an intriguing opportunity to engage the rhetoric of the everyday, to investigate how people make arguments—particularly for specific identities and social selves—in the absence of significant (or even any) face-to-face dialogue. This essay points to some of the ways in which the body can be seen to function as argumentation per se, operating by way of claims supported by evidence and reasoning. Because of the social control exerted by the penitentiary, tattooing is uniquely important as an argumentative device within the social space of the penitentiary system. In this context, tattoos allow prisoners to make arguments and express values they are unable to otherwise.

El capítulo 8 de Frege pragmatized: bringing sense back into logical theory ofrece de una manera clara y accesible un análisis de la tesis multimodal con respecto a la na-turaleza de la argumentación, defendida en las últimas décadas desde la Lógica Informal y la Teoría de la Argu-mentación. Este análisis se extiende a otras cuestiones, como la del papel que juegan las representaciones vi-suales en las pruebas matemáticas, especialmente en aritmética. La cuestión de fondo es si las representacio-nes no lingüísticas poseen la estructura necesaria para vehicu-lar contenido proposicional y, en caso positivo, para presentar dicho contenido de una forma que pueda entrar en relaciones inferenciales con otras proposiciones.
Presentaré brevemente la postura de Frápolli con res-pecto a la naturaleza de la argumentación y a continua-ción abordaré una concepción de la crítica estética que, considero, puede apoyar la tesis multimodal o, al me-nos, alguna forma de entender la contribución racional de las imágenes y otras representaciones no lingüísticas a los procesos argumentativos.

This keynote address from the 2001 Alta Argumentation conference explores moments in which argument plays out its productive limits, in which its identity opens and destabilizes. To do this, I review writings on counterpublics and controversy to make clear the role of the
presentational in oppositional argument. Second, I replay some of the themes in the writings on visual argument, and try to add some new elements to the game. Third, I highlight the points of disagreement in writings on personal testimony, and see what happens when we make explicit the presentational in it.

This essay argues for a cognitive, contextual and reception oriented approach to visual argumentation. It illustrates such an approach by analyzing the context and rhetorical potential of an election campaign advertisement and by establishing which arguments the public actually reconstructed from this advertisement.

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This paper analyzes the PowerPoint handouts of 22 engineering undergraduate students to establish criteria for judging the persuasive capabilities of the students' visual argument in handouts that are expanded versions of PowerPoint slides used for presentations. Specific guidelines on how to create effective visual arguments are useful as slides meant for presentations cannot be used handouts. Method: The criteria were derived primarily from Doumont's (2002) three laws of professional communication that suggest how to combine rhetorical and visual elements to form coherent arguments. The results show that Doumont's laws are able to judge the persuasiveness of the students' visual arguments. In addition, the weaknesses in the students' visual argument applied to all three laws, which is in line with Doumont's view that the laws have an order of precedence. The guidelines in this paper could help practitioners convert their slides into handouts more effectively and encourage teachers to spend more time in teaching visual argument in the classroom.

"VISIONES". VISUAL TOOLS NELL'ORATORIA FORENSE ANTICA E MODERNA Gianluca Sposito Abstract ["Visiones". Visual tools in ancient and contemporary forensic oratory] Since the end of the last century, many scholars have studied the capability of visual languages and images themselves to "argue". Visual argumentation is deeply rooted in Greek and Roman rhetoric, which already distinguished between the use of real visual tools and the use of words for producing images and suggestions. Today, it is more than ever necessary to establish a balanced relationship between images and words, as the ancient rhetoricians already prescribed. Although it is not easy to reconstruct a continuity between ancient and modern rhetorical techniques, comparing them to each other is a possible and useful exercise.

The article aims to clarify and define the relation between two current strategies representative for the contemporary studies in the field of visual culture: Visual Studies and Visual Rhetoric. The study gives definitions of these two strategies and draws their taxonomy analyzing fundamental concepts like: visuality, visual image, visual persuasion,  visual culture ect.
The central article's idea is that the rhetorical schema for evaluation of visual imagery offers a curious methodology for the visual culture studies. A core part of the study is dedicated to the interdisciplinary debate about Visual Argument and Visual Argumentation (Foss, S., Blair, A., Birdsell, D., Goark, L.) and the contribution of this debate to the effective exploration of various phenomenons of visual culture and communication.

This paper examines the use of photographs in the protests after the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. In particular, the essay argues that the use of the phrase "I am Trayvon Martin" creates problems when uttered in the presence of photographs of Martin. The claim "I am Trayvon Martin" disrupts the ontological potential of the photograph and the overall argumentative potential of the protests.

This paper analyzes the relationship between the linguistic concept of presupposition and visual images. First, it gives examples of multimodal cases, when a linguistic presupposition is associated to visual images. In the second part are examined ways of visually suggesting the idea of presupposition.