Hédi Csordás

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.

In pragma-dialectics, a study of legal reasoning analyses judicial judgements’ dialectical and rhetorical aspects. Most analytical studies of legal reasoning focus on the role of judges and their decision-making mechanisms. In our study, we focus on the strategic manoeuvring of the opposing parties. Depending on the context, parties may have to justify their decision to litigants, a professional audience, and the public in rhetorically and dialectically different ways. What makes strategic manoeuvring special in judicial trials is that rhetorical aims (winning the debate) and dialectical aims (convincing the jury), in contrast with debates where parties dialectically aim at resolving a dispute by reaching consensus, are not in conflict. We analyse the Depp ctr. Heard trial 2022, focusing on the parties’ dialectical potential in cases when rhetorical aspects play an important role in addition to objective evidence required by the legal framework. Depp’s party started the trial with a strategic movement we shall call as a ‘topical shift’, doubling their starting position, aiming at dual dialectical goals, and hence also beginning a new debate parallel with the apparently only one by introducing a not directly relevant factor into the debate. Although other factors also played a role in Depp’s victory, setting up his position in the confrontation stage this way was decisive for the trial’s outcome: Heard’s party, following a traditional route, joined actively in one of the dual debates only, effectively giving up the extra debate started by Depp. This way, analysing the trial offers wider consequences to how to understand strategic manoeuvring in judicial trials, and in general as well.