Visual Argumentation: A Further Reappraisal

Abstract

Visual argumentation is an incipient field in the broad domain of argumentation. Once admitted – even if not by all theorists of argumentation – that visual argumentation exists, it seems to me necessary at this stage of its development to reassess its definition. So, in the first part of this article, I raise the issue of the definition of the field, as I feel uncomfortable with the existing ones. I then explore the relationship between “visual” and “argument”, in order to propose a definition of “visual argument” that goes beyond the standard definition of it as an argument expressed visually, as this definition still assumes that arguments are essentially verbal. This leads me to wonder to what extent is an argument displayed visually different from the same argument displayed verbally. In order to answer, I propose to distinguish between arguments expressed either verbally or visually (like arguments of authority) and arguments better expressed visually (like arguments by analogy). In the second part of my paper I raise an additional and related issue, that of the relationship between verbal and visual in visual arguments. In most cases of visual arguments, indeed, the argument is not purely visual, but mixed, since the argumentation is both verbal and visual. The problem, however, is that, due to the hegemony of verbal argumentation, most scholars, even those favorable to visual argumentation, continue to assume that in the case of mixed media, the argumentation is above all verbal, so that the visual plays a minor role. So, to counter this widespread opinion, I provide a classification of the different kinds of relationships between the visual and the verbal in mixed media argumentation. Such a classification intends to reassert the importance of the visual in mixed media argumentation. Finally, in the third section, I briefly sketch two lines of research for further development of the field: the relationship between visual persuasion and visual argumentation, on the one hand, and the argumentative function that visual figures and tropes can have, on the other.