Should Visual Arguments be Propositional in Order to be Arguments?

Black Lives Matter: The Emotional and Racial Dynamics of the George Floyd Protest Graffiti

“…Visual rhetoric has substantial power to communicate ideas and influence public debate. To better understand the rhetorical power of graffiti, the theoretical framework is situated within the existing field of visual argumentation wherein graffiti acts as a multi-modal tool for the communication and dissemination of ideas (Birdsell & Groarke, 1996, 2008Fleming, 1996;Blair, 2003;Roque, 2015;Shelley, 2003). According to W.J.T Mitchell, we are living in a world influenced by a "visual" or pictorial turn in which people are more inclined to perceive and remember key events more through images than through written exposition (Bleiker, 2018, p. 4).…”

“…According to W.J.T Mitchell, we are living in a world influenced by a "visual" or pictorial turn in which people are more inclined to perceive and remember key events more through images than through written exposition (Bleiker, 2018, p. 4). Because many graffiti artists generally employ more than one mode of artistic expression often combining the visual with the verbal in some shape or form, I will use multi-modal argumentation theory to examine graffiti's argumentative activity and communicative function (Blair, 2015;Roque, 2015). I also take into consideration Groarke's (2002) theory of argumentation that concedes that the visual is as effective as the verbal in establishing the foundational elements of an argument.…”

Argumentação multimodal: desafios e tendências recentes. Uma introdução ao número especial

“…Em primeiro lugar, a comunicação verbal é regida por convenções codificadas -uma gramática -, enquanto a "linguagem" das imagens é aparentemente arbitrária e subjetiva, o que pode levar a problemas de confiabilidade (GROARKE, 2002;JOHNSON, 2003). No entanto, as imagens nem sempre são, nem meramente são, semblantes de um estado de coisas real ou imaginário -que por si só pode ser representado proposicionalmente (ROQUE, 2015); elas consistem em representações, não raro altamente convencionalizadas, como é o caso dos símbolos (BIRDSELL;GROARKE, 1996). Além disso, as imagens constroem significado por meio de convenções específicas, que podem ser definidas a partir de uma "gramática" da expressão visual (KRESS; VAN LEEUWEN, 2006; VAN LEEUWEN, 2005).…”

When context changes

“…The challenge here is to find ways of describing the various information sources and inference steps at work in every artifact and its dynamic interpretation by the recipients-particularly with regard to their multimodal nature and the difficulties of reconstructing both the often not so explicit content and the structures. Whereas general theories of context are indeed available in the realm of discourse studies or cognitive approaches (e.g., Van Dijk, 2008), and while they could easily be applied to argumentation theory, the question of the propositionality of multimodal arguments, for example, is still a highly-discussed issue in the relatively new strand of multimodal argumentation (Groarke, 2002;Birdsell and Groarke, 2007;Roque, 2015). If it is really the case that multimodal arguments cannot be fully described in terms of propositions, how can contextual information be adequately described as playing an important role in argumentation, in general, or in multimodal argumentation, more specifically?…”