How Are Images Used for Visual Argumentation? : How Do Images Argue Without Logic?

Abstract

This study shows how images convince through visual argumentation. Images are used to argue without logic and without possibility of negation. Moreover, no culture has elaborated its images as a language or systematically defined them within grammar as countable vocabulary. For this reason, it is astonishing that social knowledge communication through images is based on optically arranged data that, in human interpretation, stabilizes a visual form without any logic. Images have initiated the pictorial turn in the communication of the global network society and thus replaced the linguistic turn. Despite the global flood of images, there is a lack of theoretical and empirical analysis of how syntactic, semantic and pragmatic codes of optically recognizable images are used as visual arguments for scientific, political, economic and cultural decisions. The lecture offers answers to how images convince as visual argumentation in socio-cultural contexts. Images are used to generate insights whose visually communicative arguments are used, for example, in photography, archaeological aerial photography, computer tomography, art and art history. The lecture will work out which pictorial arguments are used and which sign theory or semiotics they follow. It also shows which arguments online reality uses, and how online reality argues about the illusion of architectural signs. The content of the lecture shows the social acquisition of knowledge through visual argumentation. In particular, the emotional, aesthetic and creative persuasiveness of images is examined with regard to their visual argumentation.

Presenters

Andreas Schelske
Professor, Institute for Media Economics and Journalism / Department Management, Information, Technology, Jade University of Applied Sciences, Niedersachsen, Germany

Details

Presentation Type

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Theme

The Image in Society

KEYWORDS

Visual Argumentation, Semiotics, Pictorial Turn, Virtual Reality, Knowledge Communication

Digital Media

Downloads

Schelske: How Are Images Used for Visual Argumentation? (MP4)

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Schelske: How Are Images Used for Visual Argumentation? (PDF)

Lecture_Lisbon_Schelske01092021_VideoLink.pdf

Schelske: How Are Images Used for Visual Argumentation? (PDF)

Lecture_Lisbon_Schelske01092021_note.pdf