Edited by Jens Allwood, Olga Pombo, Clara Renna and Giovanni Scarafile
[Controversies 16] 2020
► pp. 53–74
We argue that understanding visual arguments is underdetermined. We address the question concerning how controversial understandings of visual arguments can be handled only by particularism. The distinction between the generalist and the particularist stance taken from moral philosophy offers a way to answer this question. On the particularist view visual principles are incapable of that feat because the visual meaning of a particular visual stimulus is always context-dependent. Instead of appealing to visual principles, the particularist would contrast different situations in a way that their relevant features resemble each other. Understanding a visual argument and the involving context requires analogical reasoning that can be accounted only by particularism. Visual arguments’ valid interpretation can be grasped only within a particularist-like framework.