Visual argument
Everyday public discourse typically includes images, such as press photographs, memes, political cartoons, among others. While these images can serve many functions, in some instances, they adopt argumentative roles, for example, by offering support for a purported claim, prompting reflection on a crucial issue, or evoking emotions. Many scholars have studied these images as visual arguments. However, further research is needed to address criticisms such as the criticism of vagueness, which claims that images are too open to interpretation to convey premises and conclusions, and the assumption of verbal-visual asymmetry, which suggests that visual arguments cannot be analyzed using the concepts and methods developed for verbal arguments. This thesis aims to address these criticisms by examining the question: What is a visual argument, and how can actual instances of it be identified? Drawing on pragma-dialectics, informal logic, and rhetoric, it advances the following claims: 1) A visual argument is a pictorial act in which an image is used to convince viewers of a particular standpoint; 2) visual arguments can be identified by examining visual and verbal cues, Gricean maxims and rules, among other context-dependent factors; 3) visually conveyed inferences can be identified through argument schemes and the pragma-dialectical method of diagramming arguments; and 4) critical questions can help evaluate propositions conveyed through images. The thesis addresses the aforementioned criticisms by demonstrating that images can convey conclusions and premises, and visual arguments can be identified, reconstructed, and evaluated similarly to verbal