Can the image be an argument?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15448/1980-3729.2016.2.21445Keywords:
Visual Rhetoric, Argumentation Theory, CommunicationAbstract
In societies like ours with a strong visual culture, it is urgent to question the legitimacy of extending the classical and rational notion of “argument”, to nonlinguistic or non-discursive fields, as is the case of visual phenomena. Contributing to the lusophone debate about the argumentative potential of images, this article argues that although not all images have an argumentative form, it does not necessarily leads us to assume that no argument can be presented in a visual form. Admitting the verbalist perspective on visual arguments, according to which visual arguments have a discursive nature, the paper stresses the importance of visual propositions to the reason-giving process that characterizes argumentation. The analysis of a cartoon and the isolation of its visual propositions provides the opportunity to demonstrate how, in everyday life, we can observe how a visual argument works.Downloads
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