Visual Retorical Argumentation

Semiotica 2018; 220: 69–94
Jens E. Kjeldsen*
Visual rhetorical argumentation
https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2015-0136
Abstract: In semiotics and the study of pictorial communication, the conceptua-

lization of visual rhetoric and argumentation has been dominated by two con-
nected approaches: firstly, by providing an understanding of visual rhetoric
through tropes and figures; and secondly, by interpreting pictures as texts that
are read and decoded in the same way as words. Because these approaches
provide an opportunity to understand pictures as a form of language, they
contribute in explaining how pictures can be used to argue. At the same time,
however, these approaches seem to under-communicate two central aspects of
pictorial argumentation: its embedment in specific situations and the distin-
guishing phenomenological aesthetics of pictures. This paper argues that the
study of visual argumentation must understand pictures both as language and
as a material aesthetic event. The possibility and actuality of visual argumenta-
tion is partly explained by understanding argumentation as a cognitive and
situational phenomenon, and partly by introducing the notion of symbolic
condensation. It is suggested that reconstruction of visual argumentation should
be supported by reception analysis.
Keywords: rhetoric, semiotics, visual rhetoric, visual tropes, visual figures
1 Tropological beginnings
In the study of visual rhetoric and argumentation, the search for visual tropes
and figures (schemes) has been predominant at least since Roland Barthes’
“Rhétorique de l’image” (1977, originally published in french in 1964) and
Jacques Durand’s “Rhétorique et image publicitaire” (1970; cf. 1987). Barthes
and Durand represent a structuralist semiotic tradition that has initiated a
variety of tropological approaches to visual rhetoric. What is common and
distinctive to these approaches is that they apply only a small and limited part
of rhetorical theory and its apparatus when explaining visual rhetoric and
argumentation. Critics tend to turn to the rhetorical art of style (elocutio), and
especially the art of ornament and adornment (ornatus) – one of the four virtues
*Corresponding author: Jens E. Kjeldsen, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway,

E-mail: jens.kjeldsen@uib.no
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70 Jens E. Kjeldsen
of elocutio – to explain the visual persuasion of pictures through tropes and

figures.
The search is mainly for metaphors and metonymies, which as concepts are
often paralleled with Roman Jakobson’s linguistic concepts of paradigm and
syntagm.1 Thus, the analyses present themselves as a unification of semiotic and
structural theory with the rhetorical art of ornatus. This is the case with the
Belgian Groupe µ, who developed an elaborate theory of rhetoric and visual
communication based on tropes and figures (Groupe µ. 1970, 1992, 1995).
However, as pointed out by Gérard Genette, instead of a general rhetoric,
these approaches are actually a tropological reduction, entailing a gradual
limitation: firstly from the full theory of rhetoric to the narrow treatment of
rhetorical tropes and figures, then to only metaphor and metonymy, and finally
exclusively to the metaphor: “Nowadays we call general rhetoric what is in fact a
treatise on figures” (Genette 1970: 103–104).
I refer to this method of critique and analysis as the ornatus approach or the
tropological critique of visual rhetoric. It is an approach that has carried on into
deconstructivism and into contemporary research in advertising and marketing
(e.g., McQuarrie and Philips 2008; Scott and Batra 2003; Forceville 1996),
searching for artful deviations from expectations by the viewer of ad images.
While I suggest that the ornatus approach (described in more detail below)
is problematic when performed as a restrained rhetoric, I do not claim that the
study of visual tropes should be avoided. I have myself argued that visual tropes
in advertising may help the viewer to reconstruct argumentation communicated
visually (Kjeldsen 2012). However, aspects such as rhetorical situation, visual
aesthetics, and the role of values and topoi in rhetorical communication must be
taken into consideration; otherwise tropes will not be able to explain visual
rhetoric and argumentation.
2 Rhetoric and semiotics: The restrained

figurative approach to rhetoric
In “The rhetoric of the image,” first published in 1964, Roland Barthes assumes
that if classical rhetoric were to be rethought in structural terms, it would
“perhaps be possible to establish a general rhetoric of the signifiers of
1 The fusion of the concepts paradigm/syntagm with the concepts metaphor/metonymy was
probably first done by Jakobson (1956). For comments and accounts of this fusion, see Barthes’s
essay Rhetoric of the images in Barthes (1977), and Vickers (1997 [1988]: 442–453).

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Visual rhetorical argumentation 71
connotation, valid for articulated sound, image, gesture” (Barthes 1977: 50). This
“figurative” approach to visual rhetoric is further pursued by Jacques Durand,
who defines rhetoric as the art of fake speaking (“l’art de la parole feinte”;
Durand 1970: 70), and describes its task as transforming or converting the
proper expression (“le langage propre”) into a figurative or rhetorical expression
(“langage figuré”). What is said by using a rhetorical figure or trope may also be
said in a different, or ordinary, manner. By examining more than one thousand
magazine advertisements, Durand sought to “find a visual transposition of the
rhetorical figures in the advertising image” (Durand 1987: 295).
This was done by considering “a rhetorical figure as a transformation from a
‘simple proposition to a ‘figurative proposition’” (Durand 1987: 295). Such a
semiotic ornatus perspective on visual communication and argumentation is
first and foremost a conceptual search for meaning through a hunt for tropes
and figures (schemes).
Even though such an approach to understanding visual rhetoric and argu-
mentation has its benefits, the ornatus perspective also has some fundamental
deficiencies. Firstly, ornatus is a very limited part of rhetoric, and the semiotic
ornatus approach thus entails a limited part of rhetorical persuasion. Because
Ornatus is only one of the four virtues of elocutio, and elocutio only one of the
five canons of rhetoric, it is obvious that this approach is only partly rhetorical.2
To make tropes and figures the starting point of a discussion of visual rhetoric
drastically limits the art of rhetoric, because it entails only one quarter of one fifth
of the art, which is why Genette calls it a “rhetoric restrained” (Genette 1970).
Secondly, the ornatus perspective on visual rhetoric is problematic because
it is based on what could be called the “transformation theory,” which presup-
poses that rhetorical expressions (whether verbal or visual) are transformations
from a “natural” or “normal” way of expressing the same thing. A point can be
expressed in ordo naturalis, the natural or ordinary way. However, if we want to
add more emotional power and adherence of the audience, the same point can
also be expressed in ordo artificialis, the artful or artificial way. So, we have a
distinction between the proper way of saying something (langage propre), and
2 Some tropological studies, especially in the early phase, seem to be primarily concerned
with just locating visual tropes and figures (e.g., Bonsiepe 1961; Durand 1987; Dyer 1990
[1982]). Dyer devotes a whole chapter, “The Rhetoric of Advertising,” to discussing Roland
Barthes’ “The Rhetoric of the Image” and Jacques Durand’s “Rhétorique et image publici-
taire.” Other studies use the tropes mainly as a means of describing semantic operations, i.e.,
ways of making meaning, while some try more directly to explain persuasion through these
operations. In continuation of (and partly in opposition to) Jakobson, Barthes and Durand, we
find Umberto Eco’s treatment of “The Rhetorical Labor” in A Theory of Semiotics (Eco 1979
[1975]).

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72 Jens E. Kjeldsen
the rhetorical or figurative way of saying something (langage figuré). However,

both theoretically and practically it is difficult, if at all possible, to distinguish
between the natural and the figurative expression, and indeed to define what
the so-called natural expression is. It is easy to presuppose a “natural order” –
as the ancient rhetoricians did – but rather more difficult to say what that
natural order of a figurative expression might be. The transparent or “sober”
expression is itself a rhetorical choice and strategy. What, then, is this kind of
expression a transformation from? The presumption of a “natural” or “normal”
expression is equally problematic when dealing with visual representations. A
distinctive feature of an iconic representation is that it has a “natural presence”
in its own right. In other words, it is what it shows.
When dealing with images, one can choose between countless expressions
created by techniques of perspective, distance, composition, editing, framing,
and so on. Generally it is rather difficult to judge one expression as more
“natural” than another. In rhetoric, the main purpose of figurative language is
essentially to stir the emotions unnoticed, without drawing attention to the
language style itself. In fact, a general rule of rhetoric is that the language
and the language form must be transparent – like an unnoticed window through
which we see the message. The examples used in the ornatus approach –
especially in advertising studies – are generally pictures with obvious transfor-
mations; however, these kinds of distortions and reversals of form are only a
small part of visual rhetoric and argumentation in general.
Thirdly, ornatus is embedded in verbal language. Because of the strong
connection between ornatus and the verbal language the ornatus perspective
provides a rather unmanageable starting point for critical and theoretical treat-
ment of visual rhetoric, and underestimates the material character and special
aesthetics of imagery. The general and universally valid thoughts of argumenta-
tion and topoi in invention, and in some tropes, are more or less free from the
constraints of verbal expression, most tropes and figures are their verbal form or
shape. The meaning of tropes and figures such as prosopopoeia (confirmatio),
anaphora, and alliteration are embedded in the expressions themselves.
Expressions and meanings such as these are either impossible to find in visual
representations or can only be located by constraining both the figurative
expression and the visual representation to an unreasonable degree.
Finally, because the ornatus approach is biased towards a general under-
standing of communication as a langue, it employs a structuralist view of
pictures that tends to concentrate primarily on relations inside the picture
frames, and therefore tends to overlook important aspects of the rhetorical
situation, such as the classic concepts of the right moment of speaking, kairos,
and the proper adaptation of the speech to the occasion, aptum (decorum).

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3 Language or event: Two strands of research

into visual communication
The ornatus approach to visual rhetoric and argumentation belongs to a semio-
tic view that regards pictures as a codified language system. This view has
several theoretical strands. Most notably, we may distinguish between huma-
nistic, structuralist studies of visual communication in general on the one hand,
and a social scientific and psychological study of visual persuasion in marketing
and advertising on the other.3
Most of these approaches are concerned with the tropological meaning
operations and messages of images, and examine how these are read or
decoded. Normally, the receiver’s comprehension of the message is explained
by describing and defining different elements and units of meaning in the
image, usually specific deviations from an assumed norm. Furthermore, the
critic defines and describes different systems, rules or codes allowing a receiver
to recognize and combine these elements, minimal units, parts and utterances
and ascribe meaning to them. The approach is generally conceptual and cogni-
tive, and does not distinguish between the verbal and the visual, departing from
an assumption that
there is nothing special about the visual modality. Pictures can be signs and semiotic
theory explains the communicative function of pictures using the same constructs that
explain the function of words. Pictures can take the form of rhetorical figures, and rhetoric
explains the function of these figures using the same tools as for words … whether
something is visual or verbal, pictorial or auditory, may be of little consequence.
(McQuarrie and Mick 2003: 215–216)
Visuals such as pictures, then, are semiotically understood to “signify by

convention rather than by resemblance to nature” (Scott 1994: 253). Instead of
seeing pictures as mirrors of reality, they are seen as information (and messages)
in symbolic form, working as symbolic systems.
Pictures are viewed as “messages that must be processed cognitively by
means of a complex combination of learned pictorial schemata and that do not
necessarily bear an analogy to nature” (Scott 1994: 253):
3 Besides the humanistic semiotic tradition of scholars such as Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes
and others (cf. Nöth 1997), Kress and van Leeuween (1996) have developed a social semiotic
theory of representation dealing more with function and discuss the semiotic resources avail-
able for communicative action, rather than semiotic codes having certain meanings. The social
semiotic and psychology-inspired research tradition can be found in McQuarrie and Philips
(2008) and Scott and Batra (2003).

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74 Jens E. Kjeldsen
Because visuals are convention based, all pictures must be interpreted according to
learned patterns – just like reading words or recognizing numbers – and thus must be
processed cognitively rather than merely absorbed. Using pictures as peripheral stimuli
becomes questionable under this theory. (Scott 1994: 269)
As I will demonstrate, this semiotic and cognitive view of pictures as a form

of conventional meaning-making helps explain why and how we can use pic-
tures to perform argumentation. However, it also seems to lack fundamental
aspects of what makes a picture a picture. Pictures not only offer something that
is decoded as meaning or semiotic content, they also work rhetorically and
aesthetically by creating resonance in the audience.
In contrast to the semiotic and symbolic view, a more hermeneutic and
holistic approach to pictures is that of regarding pictures as event and mediated
evidentia (cf. Kjeldsen 2012). This is something more than and different to
decoding a language. In general, the semiotic view of pictures as language
has a tendency to overlook the distinguishing features of pictures, namely that
they appear for the viewer as a coherent sensuous phenomenon: an aesthetic
event we sense and experience. This view normally describes pictures as nat-
ural, motivated or analogous, which is characteristic of the photograph. Susanne
K. Langer, for instance, writes that the photograph does not have a vocabulary
(Langer 1980 [1942]: 95)4; and in his essay “The photographic image,” Roland
Barthes calls the photographic image “the perfect analogon.” It is, he writes, “a
continuous message,” a “message without a code” (Barthes 1977: 17).
Similarly, André Bazin writes that: “Photography affects us like a phenom-
enon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins
are an inseparable part of their nature” (Bazin 1967: 13). Bazin and Siegfried
Kracauer have been called naïve realists, who believe that there is no essential
difference between the way we perceive the world itself and the way the world is
depicted through photographic pictures (Andrew 1984: 19). I would claim,
rather, that Bazin, Kracauer and other so called naïve realists, like Hans Jonas
in Phenomenon of Life (1966) and Roland Barthes’ (1982) Camera Lucida, employ
a phenomenological perspective that reminds us about the distinctive qualities
and affordances of pictures. Nicholas Mirzoeff calls this “sensual immediacy.”
For him this concept expresses “the very element that makes visual imagery of
all kinds distinct from texts” (Mirzoeff 1999: 15), and he uses it to reject what he
4 Even though Langer claims that pictures do not have vocabulary, she still thinks that: “Visual
forms – lines, colors, proportions, etc. – are just as capable of articulation, i.e., of complex
combination as words. But the laws that govern this sort of articulation are altogether different
from the laws of syntax that govern language” (Langer 1980 [1942]: 93).

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considers to be the structural semiotics’ exclusive concern with linguistic

meaning.
I agree with this critique. That said, there is truth to the argument that the
view of pictures as event tends to overlook the potential of pictures to function as
language and thus the ability to form both utterances and argumentation. If we
consider pictures as only a mirror of reality – or a window we look through – we
will miss the fact that pictures are used rhetorically, that the style of a picture – its
naturalness and appearance – is a rhetorical construction created conventionally.
3.1 Pictures are both event and language
So, in general, theories of visual communication can be divided into two main
strands: a semiotic tradition that regards pictures as codified language that often
works through visual tropes and figures, and a phenomenologically influenced
tradition that regards pictures as event – a sort of mediated evidentia. The
problem with the language tradition is that it often has a limited ornatus
approach, and is more concerned with cognitive transmission of meaning than
with the performative aspects of the visual. The problem with the phenomen-
ological approach is that it tends to overlook the capacity of images to function
as a language and to perform visual communication acts such as making an
argument.
However, it is not an either-or choice. The power of pictorial rhetoric and
argumentation is that it can work as both event and language system.5 Pictorial
communication, I suggest, has the possibility to unite the general with the
specific, the rational with the emotional, noesis with aeistheis. Of course, verbal
communication, for instance, may perform both rational and emotional appeals,
and may work on both the level of the general and the specific, and noesis and
aesthesis. The difference is that pictures allow these dimensions to be united in
a way that makes a sign simultaneously work in the symbolic and iconic – and
sometimes the indexical – mode. With pictures we can decode symbolically and,
at the same time, experience iconically. In contrast to words, pictures will
always show something concrete. A photograph of a dog cannot be restricted
to just representing something general, as would the verbal utterances “dogs” or
5 The distinction between event and language system is not to be confused with the structuralist
distinction between langue and parole. When using both pictures and verbal language, we can
differentiate between the actual use and the general rules behind this use. My distinction
between event and language system is a distinction between sensuous, phenomenological
perception and the decoded understanding.

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76 Jens E. Kjeldsen
“domestic dog.” A picture will always show a specific dog in a way we can
sense. A picture of a specific dog will also inherently carry the signification of
the general concept of “a dog.” Furthermore, as viewers of and participants in a
rhetorical interaction, we usually realize that images not only depict something,
but are also used to utter something; we know that they are acts of communica-
tion, and thus we are inclined to look for elements to decode and make sense of
as part of an intentional act of communication.
Generally speaking, research in visual argumentation has moved between
two different—and seemingly contradictory – positions (Kjeldsen 2015a). On the
one hand, scholars have pointed to the fact that argumentation is cognitive or
logical and hence independent of a specific form of expression (Schwed 2007;
Kjeldsen 2007; Van Den Hoven 2015). On the other hand, scholars have also
pointed to the fact that visuals are obviously a very different form of expression
and therefore can neither constitute arguments (Fleming 1996; Johnson 2003;
Patterson 2010) nor provide a special kind of argumentation (Gilbert 1994;
Gilbert 1997; Van Den Hoven 2012; Kjeldsen 2015b).
However, as I have argued, we generally understand and experience pic-
tures by both decoding them semiotically (as language and symbolic logic) and
by sensing them in an immediate and aesthetic way. We know that pictures are
not reality per se, but they look real. In our encounters with images, we thus
both perceive a specific event that we can see and feel, and receive a message
we can interpret and comprehend. Studies of pictorial argumentation should
therefore involve both a semiotic decoding and a perceptual, aesthetic, phenom-
enological understanding of the presented event with its mediated evidentia and
sensual appeals. These two operations should be viewed and understood in
unison because this is how pictorial argumentation and rhetoric works. The full
rhetorical potential of pictures is thus exercised when their discursive ability to
create utterances, propositions and arguments is united with their aesthetic
materiality and sensual immediacy (cf. Kjeldsen 2012).
The cognitive perspective is necessary for a theory of visual argumentation
because such a theory must make arguments independent of a certain form of
expression – such as written text. However, this approach also risks rendering
pictures as just another way of expressing premises and conclusions, which
would make it impossible to acknowledge the form of expression, materiality
and aesthetics that makes pictures different from other forms of communication.
When arguments are extracted from pictures, for instance, there seems to be no
difference between verbal or visual arguments. They both consist of premises we
can “read.” The same applies to tropes in the cognitive tradition. Metaphors are
metaphors whether they are verbal or visual (cf. Forceville 1996). We see the same
tendency in research into visual rhetoric, where for, instance, a visual ideograph

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seems to be an ideograph that happens to appear in an image (cf. Edwards and

Winkler 1997; Palczewski 2005). Matter doesn’t seem to matter. But what is lost in
a purely cognitive approach is what makes a picture a picture, a word a word. I
will address this in more detail later, but first we have to tackle the other side of
the issue: the assumption that pictures cannot function as arguments, since they
are – allegedly – not capable of working as a language.
4 The assumption that pictures cannot perform

argumentation
There seems to be general agreement that imagery can play an important role in
argumentation. However, there is still a great deal of resistance to the idea that
pictures can be arguments (cf. Fleming 1996; Johnson 2003). In general, the
attitude is that argumentation is closely related to the explicit use of words and
therefore imagery cannot constitute argumentation in the proper sense. This is
not surprising since the study of argumentation has been a study of verbal
communication for more than 2000 years. We may differentiate between two
kinds of critical positions towards visual argument. The first is a general
assumption that argumentation is a verbal phenomenon. We can call this
passive resistance to visual argument since it does not involve any active
argumentation against the existence of visual argumentation but rather assumes
that all argumentation is verbal. The second position we can call active resis-
tance to visual argument since its proponents actively argue against the exis-
tence of visual argumentation.
We find the position of passive resistance in many of the classical works of
argument. In The Uses of Argument, Toulmin analyses “the layout of arguments”
and studies “the operation of arguments sentence by sentence” (Toulmin 1958:
94, my italics). In such works, the connections between verbal language and
argumentation is strengthened by the fact that premises and conclusions in an
argument follow each other like words follow each other in speech or writing.
Both argumentation and verbal creation of meaning are a matter of connecting
thoughts with other thoughts in a sequential order. An argument is understood
as a “train of reasoning.” It is a connection between premises and conclusions,
“a sequence of interlinked claims and reasons that between them establish the
content and force of the proposition for which a particular speaker is arguing”
(Toulmin et al. 1984).
In the same way, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca define the subject for
argumentation studies as “the discursive techniques allowing us to induce or to

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78 Jens E. Kjeldsen
increase the mind’s adherence to the theses presented for its assent” (1969 [1958]:
4). In Fundamentals of Argumentation, argumentation is unequivocally defined as
a “verbal activity”: Argumentation may be accompanied by the use of non-verbal
means of communication, but without the use of language there can be no
argumentation (Van Eemeren et al. 1996: 2, 5). This was the view in early
pragma-dialectics6; however, later pragma-dialecticians warmed to the idea of
non-verbal argumentation, and several pragma-dialectic studies of visual argu-
ment appeared (e.g., Groarke 2002; Feteris et al. 2011; cf. Kjeldsen 2015a).
The assumption that pictures cannot argue also seems – at least prima facie –
to be supported by a semiotic difference between images and words. According to
some semioticians, pictures only have one level of articulation, whereas verbal
language has two (Chandler 2006: 10–11, 228–229; Eco 1979 [1975]: 213–214; cf.;
Langer 1980 [1942]).7 The first level – the primary articulation – consists of the
smallest meaningful units available, such as morphemes and words. The second
level – called the secondary articulation – consists of elements with no meaning in
themselves. These elements do not function as signifiers, but rather they distin-
guish meanings. Examples of such elements – which are also referred to as figures
or minimal functional units – include phonemes and letters. A letter has form, but
no content.
When we turn to pictures such as photographs it becomes very difficult –if
not impossible – to distinguish between these two levels. What might the non-
signifying minimal functional units (“figures”) in pictures be? Dots? Lines? Or … ?
If a line is such a unit, when does it change from being a figure to becoming a
meaningful sign? Exactly when does a line become, for instance, a nose, or an eye
or the profile of Alfred Hitchcock? In comparison to verbal language, pictures
generally do not allow for clear distinctions between pertinent and optional traits
– meaning traits that are necessary for creating a message and traits that are not
strictly necessary. Because the language of images does not consist of such well-
defined units or have an unequivocal syntax to coordinate them, the codes
6 Cf. van Eemeren et al.’s Handbook of Argumentation Theory (1987), where argumentation is
defined as a “social intellectual, verbal activity serving to justify or refute an opinion, consisting
of a constellation of statements and directed towards obtaining the approbation of an audience”
(my italics).
7 As noted by Kjørup (1978) and Sonesson (2010a, 2010b), Eco’s concepts of iconicity and
articulation are not altogether clear. They seem to vary both in individual works and between
different works. In La Struttura Assente (1968), for instance, Eco describes what he calls the
myth of the double articulation; however, in A Theory of Semiotics (Eco 1979 [1975]: 232) he
distinguishes between several different types of articulation: (1) without; (2) second only; (3)
first only; (4) two; (5) three articulations; and, finally (6) mobile articulation. It is not altogether
clear how he positions pictures such as photographs in these types.

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establishing meaning “are barely defined and continuously changing,” in a way

“which the free variants prevail over the pertinent features” (Eco 1979 [1975]: 214).
In the “realm of graphic representation,” Eco writes, “I can make use of an infinite
number of ways of portraying a horse. I can evoke it with a play of light and
shadow, I can symbolize with painstaking brushwork or define it with extreme
realism” (1979 [1975]: 214).
In contrast to this weak coding in images, verbal language is strongly coded.
When we read the sentence “Peter is reading a book,” we respond in a con-
ceptual, general and abstract way. We might mentally construct a sort of
average and general conception of the event such as “a person by the name of
Peter is reading a book.” We do this without knowing what Peter looks like,
what book he is reading, whether he is sitting or standing, if the book is big or
small, what it looks like or what the book is even called. The sentence provides
no information about any of this. In this way verbal utterances provide, in
principle, unambiguous, but thin information.
With pictures such as photographs, this is different. A picture of Peter
reading shows us not only what Peter looks like, but also what he is wearing,
whether he is sitting or standing, what the book looks like, what’s behind and in
front of him. Furthermore, the photograph is necessarily taken from a certain
angle, at a particular distance, in a certain light with a specific lens. Such
conditions contribute in creating the meaning – and thus the potential argu-
mentative dimensions – of the picture. These almost innumerable visual details
provide a thick and rich representation of the situation. They provide the picture
with plenitude (cf. Barthes 1977: 18–19). We may say that pictures, in principle,
are ambiguous, but rich in information.
This appears to have consequences for the possibility of visual argumenta-
tion. The art historian Gombrich, for instance, states that, unaided, the visual
image “altogether lacks the possibility for matching the statement function of
the language” (1982: 138). In the same way, the media scholar Paul Messaris
argues that iconic representations such as pictures are characterised by a lack of
so-called “propositional syntax” (1996: x). While spatial and temporal connec-
tions can be explicitly communicated through images, “visual communication
does not have an explicit syntax for expressing analogies, contrasts, causal
claims, and other kinds of propositions” (Messaris 1996: xi). As soon as we go
beyond spatiotemporal interpretations, he says, the “meaning of visual syntax
becomes fluid, indeterminate, and more subject to the viewer’s interpretational
predispositions than is the case with a communicational mode such as verbal
language, which possesses an elaborate set of explicit indicators of analogy,
causality, and other kinds of connections between two or more concepts”
(Messaris 1996: xiii).

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80 Jens E. Kjeldsen
The active resistance generally springs from the view that visual and verbal
communication are fundamentally different. David Fleming’s rejection of visual
argumentation is primarily based on his traditional definition of argumentation
as “reasoning towards a debatable conclusion. It is a human act conducted in
two parts (claim and support) and with awareness of two sides (the claim allows
for and even invites opposition)” (Fleming 1996: 19). Fleming states that because
we cannot distinguish between premise and conclusion in a picture, and
because pictures cannot provide claims that can be contested (since a picture
just shows something), per definition they cannot constitute arguments. Only if
we stretch the word “argument” beyond recognition, he writes, will we be able
to say that pictures may argue. We are then not really dealing with arguments at
all. The only role that a picture can play in argumentation, according to
Fleming, is as a support for verbal premises, and this is only possible if the
visual propositions are verbally anchored (Fleming 1996: 19; cf.; Barthes 1977).
Ralph Johnson provides the same kind of argumentation (2003, 2010). He
rejects the possibility of visual arguments by stating that visual argumentation is
dependent on verbal argumentation, but not vice versa (2003). Visual argu-
ments, he claims, are either not visual or not arguments.8
5 Pictures can perform argumentation

However, pictures can be used to perform argumentation, and the case for visual
argumentation has been made in many publications.9 Much can be said about
this, but here I limit myself to focusing on the view of argumentation as an act of
communication, which is an aspect that seems to have been neglected in the
discussions. As I have indicated above, the semiotic, conventional view of
pictures as a codified language system opens the door to visual argumentation.
Even though the ornatus approach, as already described, is problematic in
several ways, it does help us locate some general cognitive ways of thinking
and arguing; metaphorical thinking, for instance, can be performed both
8 It should be mentioned, en passant, that modern studies of visual culture do not agree on this
divide between the visual and the verbal. As a practice, rhetoric itself has always been visual (e.
g., Kjeldsen 2003; van Eck 2007). We cannot out of hand separate the discursive from the visual.
Our perception and understanding of images and visual representations are connected to and
dependent on our verbal concepts, without which pictures would be incomprehensible (cf.
Mitchell 1987, 2005; Baxandall 1971; Holly 1996).
9 Most notably, perhaps, (Blair 1996, 2004; Groarke 1996; Groarke 2009; Roque 2012). See also
Kjeldsen (2007, 2012).

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verbally and visually (Forceville 1996). In order for an audience to understand

that a metaphorical argument is being presented, however, it must understand
that an act of arguing is taking place.
5.1 Argumentation is a communicative act – not a verbal text

First of all, we should realize that neither conclusion nor premises in an instance
of argumentation need to be stated explicitly in words for an audience to
understand that they are presented with an argument. Because arguments are
acts, they cannot be delimited to just being discrete, verbal texts. It is necessary,
though, that the audience understand that the act of “argument-making” is
carried out. Any audience grasping this will be inclined to search for the
elements of the argument(ation) in the instance of communication that is
presented.
In principle, the speech act “making an argument” does not need to expli-
citly state claim and premises in a sequential verbal order, as long as it is
possible for the involved actors to explain what the argument is. Or, to use the
vocabulary of Daniel O’Keefe (1977, 1982): If the speech act “making an argu-
ment” can communicate an argument (Argument1), it is not necessary to expli-
citly state the premises verbally.10 As pointed out by Tony Blair: “Propositions
can be expressed in any number of ways” (Blair 1996: 26). We may explain this
through a rewriting of O’Keefe’s example of the speech act “promise making.”
We can make a promise by explicitly producing the elements which grammati-
cally are necessary to verbally promise something: subject (“I”), verb (“pro-
mise”), and infinitive clause (“to pay”). However, the communication of a
promise can also be performed without verbally explicating these three parts.
If I am asked whether I promise to pay, my promise can be made by just saying
“yes,” or by nodding my head. As long as the speech act communicates the
“promise” as an intention and commitment, the form of expression used is
irrelevant.
The same applies to communicating an argument. We may communicate an
argument verbally and explicitly by stating a syllogism, but we can also com-
municate it enthymematically in a variety of forms of expressions. In an attempt
10 O’Keefe has distinguished between so-called Argument1 and Argument2. Argument2 signifies
argument in the sense of interaction, such as discussion, deliberation or quarrel. O’Keefe
defines it as “interaction in which extended overt disagreement between the interactants
occurs.” Argument1 is defined as a form of utterance or communicative act (O’Keefe 1977). Cf.
O’Keefe (1982).

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82 Jens E. Kjeldsen
to convince my spouse that we should take a taxi home from the party, I can
communicate an argument just by moving my hand to my mouth and simulate
drinking something, thereby communicating the argument “We have had too
much to drink to drive the car home.”
One may interject that neither the nodding nor the simulated drinking
movement would make much sense without the verbal initiation of the promise
or the question. However, that does not change the fact that the argument has
been communicated visually through body language. Any kind of argumenta-
tion – verbal, visual or multimodal – will always be part of a larger context.
Generally, the context will include verbal elements, but it is neither a theoretical
nor a practical necessity. The initiating of the argumentative drinking move-
ment, for instance, does not need to be a verbal utterance such as “Are we
taking the car home?,” it can also be communicated through a questioning look
and a jingling of car keys.
As long as the speech act “making an argument” communicates the mean-
ing of the argument (Argument1), the form of communication is irrelevant. For
argumentation to occur, it is not necessary that the speech act “making an
argument” explicitly expresses the elements that are needed to create an argu-
ment. It is only necessary that the people to whom the argument is directed
understand which argument they are offered.
5.2 Argument premises are cognitive and independent of any

fixed expression
In contrast to the thickness and plenitude of visual utterances – which I men-

tioned above, and will explain in more detail below – the propositional, cogni-
tive meaning of arguments is not tied to specific manifestations, which is why
propositional meaning can be expressed in different forms of expressions. When
the petrol company Esso, for example, in their 1960s advertisements verbally
encouraged the customers to “Put a tiger in your tank,” the customers under-
stood perfectly well that they were encountering a metaphoric argumentation
encouraging them to buy their petrol from Esso. It is obvious that there is a
connection between the statement “Put a tiger in your tank” and the implicit
argumentation “You should buy your petrol from Esso (claim), because Esso has
strong petrol that gives your car power (like a tiger).” The connection, however,
is not in the structure of the statement because there is no similarity between the
verbal form of expression of Esso’s slogan and the argument offered by the
slogan. Because the manifest structure of the statement is different from the
argument the slogan communicates, we may say that there is no structural-

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manifest correspondence. In argumentation, as in communication in general,

this means that the form of expression of the speech act (“argument-making”),
can be – and often is – different from the form of expression of the abstract
object that is communicated (“the argument”).
In the same way, there is no structural-manifest correspondence when the
same metaphor is visually expressed in Esso’s television commercials through
images of a tiger. The verbal expression is different from the visual, but the
argument that is communicated is the same. It is true – as I will develop below –
that the images also contribute with more than just the propositional meaning,
that images provide a sort of thick description because the picture also influ-
ences through its innumerable visual details, but that does not change the fact
that an argument is offered.
The argument can be expressed through verbal writing or speech, through
logically structured argumentation models or through other forms of expression.
Different forms of expression, with no manifest textual or structural similarity
can communicate the same argument.
The assumption that visual communication and argumentation requires
agreement or accordance between the structure and the manifest shaping of
pictorial representations and the linguistic structure and manifestation of verbal
representations we can call the structural-manifest mistake. This assumption
feeds the idea that we can only argue with words. However, as I have attempted
to show, it is perfectly possible to make arguments with symbolic means other
than words. As suggested by Bruce Gronbeck:
If we think of meanings as called up or evoked in people when engaged in acts of

decoding, then not only words but also pictures, sounds, and other sign systems certainly
can offer us propositions of denial or affirmation, and can, as Locke understood trueness
and falsehood, articulate empirically verifiable positions. (Gronbeck 1995: 539)
The structural-manifest mistake seems to stem from traditional studies of

argumentation, which generally understand arguments as “Argument1.”
However, beginning with Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s La Nouvelle
Rhétorique (1958), argumentation studies have now moved from almost exclu-
sively understanding argumentation as formal structures in discrete, verbal
arguments to also understanding argumentation as communicative, contex-
tually conditioned interaction. The breakthrough towards a more procedural
and interactional view of argumentation came during the 1980s and 1990s. In
1984 Frans van Eemeren and Robert Grootendorst published their Speech acts
in argumentative discussions, which describes argumentation as speech acts. A
few years later, Charles Arthur Willard in A Theory of Argumentation (1989)
explicitly defines argument “as a form of interaction in which two or more

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84 Jens E. Kjeldsen
people maintain what they construe to be incompatible positions” (Willard

1989: 1, my italics). Later, Wayne Brockreide went on to claim that “arguments
are not in statements, but in people,” and “argument is not a “thing” to be
looked for, but a concept people use, a perspective they take” (Brockreide
1992: 73–4). In a similar vein, Dale Hample suggests a third perspective on
Argumentation. He argues that a third concept for argumentation, which he
calls Argument0, is necessary to complete the understanding of O’Keefe’s
concepts Argument1 and Argument2, as wells as and for argumentation in
general. He describes Argument0 as “the cognitive dimension of argument –
the mental processes by which arguments occur within people” (Hample 1992
[1974]). To say that text structures are arguments, writes Paul van den Hoven,
is a figure of speech because “argumentation per se takes place in the mind,”
and texts only metonymically “stand for the argumentative semiotic processes”
(Van Den Hoven 2015).
So, we should distinguish between Argument1, Argument2, and Argument0.
We may, for instance, say that a person who participated in an Argument2 (i.e.,
an interaction), through his argument-making (the rhetorical speech act), pro-
posed an Argument1 (a discrete verbal utterance). We may also say that the
possibility for all this lies in the mental processes whereby argumentation occurs
within people. (Argument0).
While studies of Argument1 traditionally presuppose that argumentation is
manifested in a specific form of expression such as words, studies of Argument0,
the mental processes of argumentation, are principally independent of specific
manifest forms or concrete expressions. The divide between Argument1 and
Argument0 constitutes a conceptual tool that enables us to differentiate between
argumentation as a cognitive phenomenon, which is not tied to certain forms of
expression, and the specific, material manifestations used to forward an argu-
ment (Argument1).
This distinction helps us conclude that many different forms of expression
may express an argument:
Most argument theorists view arguments (in either of O’Keefe’s senses) as residing within
messages, whether the message be a serial statement or a conversation. For these scholars,
argument is a public, textual phenomenon, and is therefore studied using speeches,
essays, or turns at talk as primary sources. But the textual view is not the only possible
one. Several writers have noticed that communication may be usefully studied as having
several loci. Argument may indeed occur in talk or writing, leading many to the conclusion
that argument is essentially a textual event. But the cognitive focus on argument finds
arguments in another place: within people who are arguing. This theoretical distinction de-
emphasizes the role of the message in argument. The only necessary role for [the] message
to play in a cognitive theory is to perform as a stimulus for the receiver’s (cognitively
generated) argument. (Hample 1992 [1974]: 93)

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Hample’s third perspective is important because it teaches us that the study of

argumentation is not just the study of verbal utterances (Hample 1980): it shows
us more than this. His cognitive understanding of argumentation also teaches us
that argumentation in principle can be expressed in different forms of expres-
sion, i.e., verbal texts as well as pictures. The cognitive perspective, then, moves
us away from the understanding of argumentation as a text, and helps us
understand it as a rhetorical act: an act that through symbolic means commu-
nicates a rational logos appeal to the audience.
Such an appeal is characterized by letting the audience understand what is
being claimed and the reasons for claiming it. However, understood as a cognitive
phenomenon, argumentation does not need to manifest itself as traditional verbal
and explicit arguments. The important thing about argumentation is not whether
someone expresses an argument in words, sequentially, formally and structurally
in accordance with the traditional understanding of an argument (Argument1).
6 Visual argumentation is based on symbolic

condensation
Visual argumentation is possible because making arguments is a communicative
act performed in interactions and because the communication of an argument
(Argument1) as a cognitive instance of premises and conclusions is not tied to
the verbal form of expression. The same argument can be prompted by different
manifestations, as long as the audience understands it in the proper argumen-
tative context.
Obviously a picture and a concise caption – which is how we usually
encounter visual and multimodal argumentation in print – do not explicitly
put forward premises and conclusions verbally. So, if pictures are to prompt
arguments in the audience, some sort of symbolic condensation must be pre-
sent. By symbolic condensation I mean the condensing of many different ideas
into one, so that the effect and meaning of a picture is grasped in one single
instant – in a blink of an eye, so to speak.
The immediacy and potential instantaneous character in the reception of
pictures do not mean that the communicated relations are less complex. On the
contrary, we may say that their complexity is not limited by the linear structure
and discursivity of verbal communication. Langer, for instance, notes that “An
idea that contains too many minute yet closely related parts, too many relations
within relations, cannot be ‘projected’ into discursive form: it is too subtle for
speech” (Langer 1980 [1942]: 93).

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86 Jens E. Kjeldsen
This projection, however, is possible with the non-discursive symbolism we

find in pictures because the primary function of the non-discursive is “concep-
tualizing the flux of sensations, and giving us concrete things in place of
kaleidoscopic colors or noises,” and this function “is itself an office that no
language-born thought can replace” (1980 [1942]: 93).
The rhetorical and argumentative value of symbolic condensation is that it
allows for a cueing and evoking of thoughts and feelings. Like a small, dense bud
instantly blossoming into a large colorful flower, imagery may lead to the unfolding
of a wide range of emotions and longer trains of thoughts. This is made possible
because of the semiotic richness of pictures because their feeling of “analogical
plenitude” is so great that verbal description is literally impossible. There are so
many details in a photograph that it would require a lengthy book to try to describe
them, and still you would not succeed because to describe a picture is “not simply
to be imprecise or incomplete, it is to change structures, to signify something
different to what is shown” (Barthes 1977: 18–19). The image, in its connotation,
writes Barthes, is “constituted by an architecture of signs drawn from a variable
depth of lexicons” (Barthes 1977: 47). Or, to put it another way: the semiotic richness
based on the many different semiotic resources (cf. Kress and van Leeuwen 1996)
working simultaneously in pictures makes the symbolic condensing possible.
Think of something as simple and as ritualized as a wedding photograph. In
order for such an image to make sense, we must call upon our knowledge of
certain photographic conventions and formal traits (e.g., perspective, composi-
tion, color), of distance to objects, interpersonal proximity, body movement,
gestures and facial expressions, clothing and flowers; this in turn calls upon
knowledge of interpersonal behavior, cultural norms, and values.
Borrowing from Umberto Eco, Hariman and Lucaites (2007: 34–35) calls this
multiplicity of simultaneous coding transcriptions. They write, that because the
camera
records the décor of everyday life, the photographic image becomes capable of directing
the attention across a field of cultural norms, artistic genres, political styles, ideographs,
social types, interaction rituals, poses, gestures, and other signs as they intersect in any
event. (Hariman and Lucaites 2007: 34–35)
Hariman and Lucaites refer here to iconic press photographs, but the theo-
retical point can be unfolded and applied in general.
Symbolic condensation, then, is made possible by the multiplicity of codes,
resources, or transcriptions, affording pictures the possibility of plenitude
(Barthes 1977: 18–19) that can offer rich and thick descriptions of events. This
condensation can be both emotional (evoking emotions) and rational (evoking
arguments and reasoning).

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6.1 Emotional condensation
Emotional condensation means that an image, or something in an image, is

capable of eliciting an extensive emotional response. As argued by visual com-
munication scholar Paul Messaris (1996: ch. 1), the persuasive power of a
pictorial representation consists of its ability to recreate visual cues, which in
the real world are connected to specific emotional responses. When we see a
small girl in real life, our parental instincts may be evoked. A picture of the same
subject invites a similar response. Both theoretical and empirical research docu-
ment that there is “considerable continuity between picture perception and
everyday, real-life vision” (Messaris 1994: 13).
Emotions are not only evoked by what we see, but also by how it is shown,
such as the point of view in a picture. A high-angle shot may infuse us with a
sense of power and control, while a low-angle shot may conjure up situations in
which we are less powerful. Because we are positioned as viewers in a way that
is analogue to positions we recognize from the physical world and our social
life, we are invited to react in similar ways.
Whereas the emotional condensation is mostly connected to the phenom-
enological view of imagery as event, the aspect of rational condensation as a way
of evoking argument and reasoning is more connected to the semiotic view of
imagery as a codified language.
6.2 Rational condensation
Rational symbolic condensation is, I suggest, the basis for the possibility of visual
argumentation. Such condensation is similar to Freud’s psychological concept of
condensation in the dream work (Freud 1999: 260), which signifies the conden-
sing of many different ideas into one. Freud also explains that condensation is
one of the three main techniques of a joke (Freud 1960: 28, 41). In general, the
appeal of jokes and cartoons (Gombrich 1978 [1963]: 130) is the concentration
and condensation of several ideas into one decisive moment.
Because pictures have the same ability to entail such condensation, they
also have the potential to present arguments. If we understand the enthymeme
as a “cooperative interaction,” as proposed by Lloyd F. Bitzer (1959), we see that
a rhetorical hallmark of pictures is that they offer a rhetorical enthymematic
process in which something is condensed or omitted, and, as a consequence, it
is up to the spectator to provide the unspoken premises.
Rational condensation in pictures, then, is the visual counterpart of verbal
argumentation. However, the spectator needs certain directions to be able to (re)

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88 Jens E. Kjeldsen
construct the arguments, i.e., some cognitive schemes to make use of.
Sometimes, such schemes may be found in the context itself, such as in the
circumstances of the situation at hand (cf. Kjeldsen 2007).
At other times – particularly in advertising – the viewer’s (re)construction of
arguments is enabled through visual tropes and figures. Metaphor and meto-
nymy, synecdoche and hyperbole, ellipsis and contrasts are among the most
common types of visual argumentation in advertising (e.g., Kjeldsen 2012;
Forceville 2008; McQuarrie and Mick 2003).
Because of their lack of clear syntax and the difficulty in distinguishing
between different meaning-making units, understanding the argumentative con-
text is essential for the audience to locate, reconstruct, and interpret argumenta-
tion performed by pictures. This is why we should be aware that argumentation
is a process, a communicative interaction between people, which means that
specific arguments must always be understood in terms of the on-going debate
or discussion they are part of. A rhetorical argument never exists in itself, it is
never presented in a vacuum, but it is always part of human interaction, some
kind of communication; if not, then it is simply not a rhetorical argument.
It is the knowledge of contextual, situational and procedural circumstances
that means that, in spite of the lack of clear rules of visual grammar and syntax
and double articulation, we actually can use images to perform argumentation.
7 Where is visual argument?

I have suggested in this paper that argumentation is a cognitive phenomenon
that must be understood as actions being performed in specific situations. I have
also suggested that pictorial argumentation works enthymematically through
the cueing of a symbolic condensation, which then unfolds as reasoning and
emotion in the audience. This naturally leads to the question: where is visual
argument? How do we locate it?
Generally, researchers study the texts or pictures cueing an argument.
However, if a picture only works as a cue to elicit arguments in the audience,
then reconstructions based on the visual cues run the risk of being the research-
er’s personal idiosyncratic construction. Due to the material and semiotic char-
acter of pictures with weak coding, no double articulation, lack of syntax and
ambiguous character, reconstructions of arguments cued by pictures will gen-
erally be more difficult to ascertain. A related problem is that we report on
arguments in verbal language or in diagrams (cf. Willard 1992), but a picture is
neither. So, how do we move confidently from one form of expression to the
other? How can a researcher be sure – and document – that the argument1

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reconstructed in words or diagrams is the one represented, cued and evoked by

the visual manifestation?
Firstly, as I have already argued, the reconstruction of pictorial argumenta-
tion based on textual analysis of an argumentative picture must include the
communicative qualities of visuals and the specific rhetorical situation the
pictorial in case is part of.
Secondly, the study of pictorial argumentation should more often include
audience analysis and reception studies (cf. Kjeldsen 2017a). This is not the
place to carry out a complete account of the value of reception studies in
pictorial argumentation, but some attention should be drawn to this method of
research. If argumentation is a cognitive phenomenon and arguments are not to
be found in texts, but in people (cf. Brockreide 1992), then argumentation
scholars should not only study texts, but also people in order to find out how
they make the move from pictorial cues to the reconstruction of arguments.
As pointed out by Hample, the “final validation of theory is empirical
observation” (1992: 94). In order to develop a theory of visual rhetorical argu-
mentation, one path to such a validation is the study of how people respond to
pictorial argumentation, examining how audiences actually process and recon-
struct concrete arguments. Such research can study public reception in specific
situations, such as that carried out in one study of a political print ad (Kjeldsen
2007). By examining the public debate about a political print ad, it became
obvious that the public in general inferred an argument from the pictorially
dominated ad, and that there was wide agreement about which argument was
put forward (Kjeldsen 2007). Another kind of reception-oriented study is the use
of focus groups, as carried out in another study of how people responded to the
visual argumentation of selected advertising pictures (Kjeldsen 2015c). This
study found that the ads invited the construction of specific arguments, and
that the respondents generally inferred the “preferred reading” (cf. Hall 1980).
It became clear that audiences are cognitively involved in interpreting the
meaning of pictures and actively reconstruct the arguments. This study also
suggests that the audience’s reconstruction of arguments as claim-reason com-
plexes (Willard 1989: 77) are generally embedded in a condensed, thick under-
standing of situations, experiences, and emotions that are invoked by the
picture (2015, cf. Kjeldsen 2017b).
In this way, empirical audience studies support the assumption that argu-
mentative pictures function both as event and language, document that pictures
can be used to perform argumentation, and provide an understanding of how
the process of pictorial argumentation works.
In order to understand pictorial rhetorical argumentation, we should pay
more attention to how visual argumentation is received, interpreted, and

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90 Jens E. Kjeldsen
processed – that is: how audiences actually respond to instances of visual

argumentation. As proposed by Schiappa: “We need to find out what people
are doing with representations rather than being limited to making claims about
what we think representations are doing to people.” (Schiappa 2008: 26, my
italics). This requires a combination of close readings of rhetorical utterances,
contextual analyses of the situation, and empirical studies of audience reception
and response.
8 Conclusion
If we seek an understanding of pictorial and multimodal argumentation, we first
have to understand that argumentation is not the same as a text, even though we
may read it as a text. Argumentation is a cognitive phenomenon, situated in
communicative action. We may analytically extract premises and argument from
texts, but we cannot just locate visual tropes and figures, find ideographs cogni-
tively, or simply extract the verbal lines of reasoning, transform them into proposi-
tions and present them in argumentation models. Because the phenomenological
quality of pictures, their visual plenitude and semantic “thickness” disappears if
we reduce the pictorial representation to only theoretical concepts, cognitive
phenomena or simple verbal propositions (cf. Kjeldsen 2015b). We also have to
acknowledge that in visual and multimodal argumentation, the audience is espe-
cially active in the reconstruction of enthymematic arguments. Therefore, the best
way to understand how visual rhetoric and argumentation works is to examine the
interplay between text, context, and reception.
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Semiotica 2018; 220: 69–94

Abstract: In semiotics and the study of pictorial communication, the conceptua-

Keywords: rhetoric, semiotics, visual rhetoric, visual tropes, visual figures

*Corresponding author: Jens E. Kjeldsen, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway,

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of elocutio – to explain the visual persuasion of pictures through tropes and

2 Rhetoric and semiotics: The restrained

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the rhetorical or figurative way of saying something (langage figuré). However,

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3 Language or event: Two strands of research

Visuals such as pictures, then, are semiotically understood to “signify by

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As I will demonstrate, this semiotic and cognitive view of pictures as a form

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considers to be the structural semiotics’ exclusive concern with linguistic

3.1 Pictures are both event and language

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seems to be an ideograph that happens to appear in an image (cf. Edwards and

4 The assumption that pictures cannot perform

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establishing meaning “are barely defined and continuously changing,” in a way

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5 Pictures can perform argumentation

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verbally and visually (Forceville 1996). In order for an audience to understand

5.1 Argumentation is a communicative act – not a verbal text

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5.2 Argument premises are cognitive and independent of any

In contrast to the thickness and plenitude of visual utterances – which I men-

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manifest correspondence. In argumentation, as in communication in general,

If we think of meanings as called up or evoked in people when engaged in acts of

The structural-manifest mistake seems to stem from traditional studies of

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people maintain what they construe to be incompatible positions” (Willard

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Hample’s third perspective is important because it teaches us that the study of

6 Visual argumentation is based on symbolic

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This projection, however, is possible with the non-discursive symbolism we

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6.1 Emotional condensation

Emotional condensation means that an image, or something in an image, is

6.2 Rational condensation

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7 Where is visual argument?

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reconstructed in words or diagrams is the one represented, cued and evoked by

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processed – that is: how audiences actually respond to instances of visual

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Brockreide, W. 1992. Where is argument? In J. R. Cox & C. A. Willard (eds.), Advances in

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