We Have Yet to See the "Visual Argument"

Abstract

In this paper, I defend two skeptical claims regarding current research on visual arguments and I explain how these claims reflect upon past and future research. The first claim is that qualifying an argument as being visual amounts to a category mistake; the second claim is that past analyses of visual arguments fault on both end of the "production line"in that the input is not visual and the output is not an argument. Based on the developed critique, I discuss how the study of images in communicative events can be carried out without the concept of "visual argument"and I illustrate this with two new directions of interdisciplinary research.