Toward a theory of visual argument.

• Author: Birdsell, David S.
• Position: Visual Argument - Part 1

These special, two issues are motivated by the conviction that argumentation theorists do not pay enough attention to the visual components of argument and persuasion. A better understanding of these components is especially important if we want to understand the role of advertising, film, television, video, multi-media, and the World Wide Web in our lives. A decision to take the visual seriously has important implications for every strand of argumentation theory, for they all emphasize a verbal paradigm which sees arguments as collections of words. Most scholars who study argumentation theory are, therefore, preoccupied with methods of analyzing arguments which emphasize verbal elements and show little or no recognition of other possibilities, or even the relationship between words and other symbolic forms. Students of argumentation emerge without the tools needed for proficiency in assessing visual modes of reasoning and persuasion. We hope that these essays will help spur the development of a more adequate theory of argument which makes room for the visual.

Though we are committed to the development of a theory of visual argument, we have chosen to begin with an article in which David Fleming details his skepticism. Visual images ("pictures") cannot, he claims, be arguments. We have begun with his paper because we want to recognize that many theorists explicitly or implicitly reject this possibility (Fleming has provided a useful bibliography), and because an answer to their objections must be the basis of a convincing account of visual argument. The rest of our issue therefore answers these objections. J. Anthony Blair attempts to meet them in a defense of the possibility and the nature of visual arguments. Cameron Shelley and Gretchen Barbatsis (appearing in the fall issue) examine cases which illuminate different kinds of visual argument, and propose conceptual distinctions necessary for dealing with different kinds of visual materials. The review essay by Lenore Langsdorf discusses an important book on images and persuasion and reflects more generally on the questions raised by contemporary attempts to understand visual persuasion.

In the present introduction we would like to add some comments on those concerns that strike us as most important when one considers the development of a theory of visual argument. The first issue which must be addressed is a prevalent prejudice that visual images are in some intrinsic way arbitrary, vague and ambiguous. This presumption encourages the view that visual images are less precise than words, and especially the written word. We think that this prejudice is a dogma that has outlived its usefulness, and that the first step toward a theory of visual argument must be a better appreciation of both the possibility of visual meaning and the limits of verbal meaning.

Visual images can, of course, be vague and ambiguous. But this alone does not distinguish them from words and sentences, which can also be vague and ambiguous. The inherent indeterminacy of language is one of the principal problems that confront us when we try to understand natural language argument. This is why historians endlessly debate the interpretation of historical documents, law courts struggle continuously with the implications of written and spoken claims, and personal animosities revolve around who said what and what was meant. The point that visual images are frequently vague and indeterminate cannot, in view of the demonstrable indeterminacy of verbal expressions, show that images are intrinsically less precise than spoken or written words (especially as we often clarify the latter with visual cues-as we may make the tone and meaning of a statement clear with a smile or a wink).

We can best illustrate the possibility of verbal meaning with some simple examples. We will begin with the following anti-smoking poster, which was produced by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services). We must begin by noting that this poster is an amalgam of the verbal and the visual [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. The important point is that this does not make its visual components redundant or superfluous. Without the visual elements we could not understand the poster, for the verbal message it contains - "don't you get hooked!" - is vague and ambiguous. It does not explicitly refer to smoking or cigarettes and could as easily refer to drugs, alcohol, or anything else which is potentially addictive. We know it is a message about smoking only because it depicts a fish which is "hooked" to a cigarette. The message of the poster is straightforward. It can plausibly be rendered as "You should be wary of cigarettes because you could get hooked and - like a fish on a lure - endanger your health." This is a quaint argument by analogy. It does not match the sophistication of the visuals which crowd our television sets - and increasingly, our computer screens - but it is an argument in the standard sense: it provides a reason for a conclusion.

This and countless similar examples make it difficult to sustain the kind of skepticism of those who maintain that the visual is radically indeterminate and cannot, therefore, sustain an argument. Consider Fleming's claim that a picture itself "makes no claim which can be contested, doubted, or otherwise improved upon by others. If I oppose the 'position' you articulate in a picture, you can simply deny that your picture ever articulated that, or any other, position." As common as such views are in academic discussions of the visual, they make little sense in the context of examples like the present one. Here the argument that you should be wary of cigarettes because they can hook you and endanger your health is forwarded by means of visual images, even though it is just the sort of claim that can be contested, doubted and improved upon. We too easily forget that there was a time when debates raged about the addictive qualities and the health effects of cigarettes. If someone viewing our sample poster did not "read" it as an attack on smoking (or arbitrarily denied that it "ever articulated that, or any other position"), then we are forced to the conclusion that they have radically misunderstood the visual image - to a point where we might reasonably wonder about their ability to comprehend the visual (much as we would wonder about someone's ability to understand English if they did not understand the corresponding verbal argument to be an attack on smoking).

Consider a second case which also illustrates the point that visual meaning can be in some cases neither arbitrary nor indeterminate. The following drawing is based on a 1926 editorial cartoon by S.K. Suvanto. The original cartoon was published in The Daily Worker, a socialist newspaper published in Chicago from 1924-1958 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. Though we are far removed from the context which produced this...