Page 71 - Žagar, Igor Ž. 2021. Four Critical Essays on Argumentation. Ljubljana: Pedagoški inštitut.
P. 71
is there anything like visual argumentation?
Figure 1. Smoking fish.
On the other hand, in the last ten years or so, visuals are more and
more often presented by the proponents of VA as directly and unambigu-
ously offering arguments by themselves, without any intervention or help
from the verbal (or any other code), and not being conditioned or in any
other way dependent on the verbal at all. Here are two reconstructed exam-
ples (I say reconstructed because I was unable to get the original materials
from the authors).
The first one is a square ball, used as an example by one of the present-
ers at the 2014 ISSA conference. It was a small drawing of a square ball (un-
fortunately, the presenter wouldn’t send me the exact drawing) with ‘China’
written on it, obviously cut from some newspaper or magazine, but present-
ed without any immediate context: it wasn’t made obvious to which section
of the newspaper the visual belonged to (and the presenter would not explain
it), nor could we see the neighbouring articles (and the presenter wouldn’t ex-
plain that either). But he was very explicit in claiming that the argument of-
fered by the visual itself was more than obvious: ‘The Chinese football sucks!’
71
Figure 1. Smoking fish.
On the other hand, in the last ten years or so, visuals are more and
more often presented by the proponents of VA as directly and unambigu-
ously offering arguments by themselves, without any intervention or help
from the verbal (or any other code), and not being conditioned or in any
other way dependent on the verbal at all. Here are two reconstructed exam-
ples (I say reconstructed because I was unable to get the original materials
from the authors).
The first one is a square ball, used as an example by one of the present-
ers at the 2014 ISSA conference. It was a small drawing of a square ball (un-
fortunately, the presenter wouldn’t send me the exact drawing) with ‘China’
written on it, obviously cut from some newspaper or magazine, but present-
ed without any immediate context: it wasn’t made obvious to which section
of the newspaper the visual belonged to (and the presenter would not explain
it), nor could we see the neighbouring articles (and the presenter wouldn’t ex-
plain that either). But he was very explicit in claiming that the argument of-
fered by the visual itself was more than obvious: ‘The Chinese football sucks!’
71
