Abstract
The chapter is about visual arguments. I address the relationships among these three: rhetoric, argument, and the visual. How can there be visual arguments when arguments as we usually know them are verbal? And if there can be visual arguments, what is their rhetorical aspect? Since arguments are supposed to be tools of persuasion and rhetoric is often thought of as including (but not exhausted by) the study and use of the instruments of persuasion, I first explore the relationships among rhetoric, argument and persuasion. Then I turn to the difficulties and opportunities that present themselves when considering visual argument in particular. The chapter ends by taking up the question: What does being visual add to arguments? It adds drama and force of a much greater order. Beyond that it can use such devices as references to cultural icons and other kinds of symbolism, dramatization and narrative to make a powerfully compelling case for its conclusion. The visual has an immediacy, a verisimilitude, and a concreteness that help influence acceptance and that are not available to the verbal. When argument is visual, it is, above all, visual rhetoric.
Reprinted, with permission, from Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers (Eds.), Defining Visual Rhetorics, Ch. 2 (pp. 41–61). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004.
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Notes
- 1.
For a recent, insightful discussion of the rhetorical role of the enthymeme, see Christopher W. Tindale, Acts of Arguing, A Rhetorical Model of Argument (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 8 ff.
- 2.
“Voici donc la définition que nous proposons: la rhétorique est l’art de persuader par le discours.”
- 3.
I would also resist Reboul’s restriction of what gets influenced to belief, and add changes in attitude and conduct to rhetoric’s goals.
- 4.
Strictly speaking, ambiguity exists when there are two possible meanings, and the context makes it impossible to determine which the author (or image creator) intended. The difficulty with visual images is more often that there is any number of possible interpretations, and there is no way to determine which of them was intended or indeed if any particular one of them was intended, and this phenomenon is properly termed “vagueness,” not “ambiguity.” The headline, “Lawyers offer poor free advice” is ambiguous, absent further contextual specification; “Coke is it!” is vague.
- 5.
- 6.
I say, some “other” attitude, because it has become widely agreed among philosophers analyzing the concept of belief that beliefs are a kind of attitude themselves (a type of “propositional attitude”).
- 7.
See the ad at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExjDzDsgbww
- 8.
I am setting aside for purposes of this discussion the enormous influence of music in television advertising. From the perspective of a study of persuasion, the role of music must be given a central place.
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Blair, J.A. (2012). The Rhetoric 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_19
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