WORKSHOP 18 June 2026

Workshop 18 June

PRAGMATIC INSIGHTS INTO MULTIMODAL ARGUMENTATION

Groningen, Faculty of Philosophy, Room Omega

12:00 - 13:00 - Chi-Hé Elder (Norwich, University of East Anglia) - Meaning through misunderstanding: Inference, intention, and the negotiation of accountability

13:00 - 13:40 - lunch

13:40 - 14:20 - Bart Verheij (University of Groningen) - An argumentation approach to correct reasoning in artificial intelligence 

14:20 - 15:00 - Jean Wagemans (Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam) - Implicitness in multimodal argumentation

15:00 - 15:20 - Tea

15:20 - 15:50 - Marta Trutalli (Università della Svizzera Italiana) - Images that speak: A multimodal study of women garment workers in digital activism concerning sustainable fashion

15:50 - 16:20 - Bernardo Rilla (University of Groningen) Exploring the Reach of Pragma-Dialectics in Multimodal Contexts

16:20 - 16:40 - tea

16:40 - 17:20 - Marta Marcora (University of Groningen) - Critical Questions and Endoxa in the AMT

17:20 - 17:40 - Eda Sükan (University of Groningen) Bridging Pragma-Dialectics and Multimodal Discourse Analysis: Reconstructing Arguments from Short-Form Videos

Chi-Hé Elder (Norwich, University of East Anglia) 

Meaning through misunderstanding: Inference, intention, and the negotiation of accountability

Misunderstandings are often treated as a deviation from communicative success, where a recipient fails to recover a speaker’s communicative intention. Against this view, this talk seeks to demonstrate that misunderstandings provide a powerful analytic window into how participants negotiate meaning in real time. Grounded in interactional pragmatics, this talk showcases how understandings between conversational partners can emerge through the management of multiple, and sometimes conflicting, meaning inferences. Drawing on examples ranging from everyday talk, aviation and police communication, to reality television, I show how meaning is rarely reducible to speaker intention alone. Instead, participants publicly manage multiple simultaneous inferences through what they say, strategically block or tolerate misalignments, and hold one another accountable for what kinds of inferences their utterances make available—which may or may not align with what the speaker intended to communicate. By tracing how speakers and recipients navigate misalignment, negotiate responsibility, and manage layered inferences across turns, I show how troubles in communication can reveal the core practices through which understanding is contested, repaired, and ultimately interactionally achieved.

Jean Wagemans (Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam) 

Implicitness in multimodal argumentation

Multimodal arguments frequently rely on implicitness. Rather than expressing all premises, conclusions, and inferential connections explicitly, arguers distribute information across verbal, visual, and other semiotic modes, leaving audiences to reconstruct essential elements of the reasoning process. While scholars of multimodal argumentation have long acknowledged the importance of implicit premises and contextual interpretation, there is still a lack of systematic procedures for identifying and reconstructing the missing links that connect multimodal premises to their conclusions.

This paper addresses this challenge by combining insights from the Multimodal Argument Type Identification Procedure (MATIP) with recent work on the reconstruction of enthymemes. Building on the notion that apparent gaps in argumentative discourse can be explained through underlying conceptual links between argumentative elements, the paper proposes a parametric approach to explicating implicit multimodal reasoning. Rather than reducing all semiotic material to verbal propositions, the approach starts from the multimodal artefact itself and examines how verbal and non-verbal elements jointly trigger the inference of unstated premises, intermediate conclusions, and argumentative levers.

Prof. dr. Bart Verheij (University of Groningen)

An argumentation approach to correct reasoning in artificial intelligence

The study of correct reasoning has a long history rooted in old philosophical, linguistic and mathematical traditions, and insights from all these perspectives have influenced the developments in the field of AI from the start. Initially, AI systems reasoned correctly by design. Later, many in AI did not even consider reasoning anymore (let alone correct reasoning). And, indeed, the alignment of correct reasoning with data and learning is a complex research problem in itself, also outside of AI. Since recently, we see reasoning behavior in generative AI systems (such as GPT and Mistral), though without correctness guarantees. In this talk, the nature of correct reasoning is considered in terms of argumentation as a computational mechanism. Connections are made to recent research in the field. 

Marta Trutalli (Università della Svizzera Italiana)

Images that speak: A multimodal study of women garment workers in digital activism concerning sustainable fashion

Visual communication and argumentation are central in contemporary social media debates on sustainable fashion, particularly in shaping public perceptions and mobilizing emotions around social issues. Activist’ campaigns rely on images to foreground workers’ human rights and women occupy a crucial position in this debate, not only as consumers, but also as garment workers and as agents of change leading organizations such as Fashion Revolution (FR). While previous research has examined social movements’ argumentation (van Dijk, 2024), including women’s discursive (self-)representation in digital activism (Greco, Mercuri & De Cock, 2021), the role of visuals in multimodal argumentation remains underexplored.

This article investigates visual argumentation concerning women garment workers during FR Week, focusing on how images are deliberately selected to be inclusive and to amplify women’s agency within a structurally marginalized labour context. It addresses the argumentative strategies emerging in Instagram posts depicting garment workers and the interaction between visual and emotional dimensions.

The study integrates Groarke’s approach (2019) to visual arguments with the Argumentum Model of Topics (Rigotti & Greco, 2019) and applies this framework to a qualitative empirical analysis that draws from a multilingual dataset of 278 Instagram posts from FR Week 2020 including explicit reference to women. Through a multimodal analysis of argumentation, this contribution aims to sheds light on persuasive strategies that construct inclusive and agency-oriented representations of women garment workers in the sustainable fashion debate.

Greco, S., Mercuri, C., & De Cock, B. (2021). Victims or agents of change? The representations and self-representation of women in the social media debate surrounding sustainable fashion. Babylonia, 2021(3), 90–94. https://doi.org/10.55393/babylonia.v3i.121

Groarke, L. (2019). Depicting visual arguments: An “ART” approach. In F. Puppo (Ed.) Informal logic: A “Canadian” approach to argument (pp. 332-374). Windsor Studies in Argumentation (WSIA), Volume 9. https://windsor.scholarsportal.info/omp/index.php/wsia/catalog/view/123/303/1653-1

Rigotti, E., & Greco, S. (2019). Inference in argumentation: A topics-based approach to argument-schemes. Cham: Springer.

Van Dijk, T. A. (2024). Social Movement Discourse: An Introduction. Routledge.

Bernardo Rilla

Exploring the Reach of Pragma-Dialectics in Multimodal Contexts

This presentation aims to investigate whether pragma-dialectics is useful for the evaluation of manipulative multimodal arguments in online controversies. Central to assessing such manipulation, is the pragma-dialectical concept of derailment of strategic maneuvering . The focus will be to follow the recent tradition of furthering the scope of pragma-dialectical evaluation by applying it to a multimodal context . More precisely, to the online social media posts on X of the German right-wing populist party Afd, who have been accused of manipulative uses of argumentation. This paper will zoom in on the argumentative instances of fallaciously denying commitments which is when responsibility is denied for implicit premises, as expressed in rule 5 of the pragma-dialectical code of conduct. Although such instances may be argued to constitute a derailment, and although pragma-dialectics may be efficient in theoretically identifying such breaking of the code of conduct, it heavily relies on the pragmatic optimum and the logical minimum which lacks a certain level of systematicity and can thereby fuel the problem of indeterminacy. It can therefore be enriched through relevance-theoretical insights which act as an extension to an already pre-existing concept. These insights can provide a systematic solution and a complementary addition to pragma-dialectics, giving more precise clarity as to when deniability should indeed be considered plausible or not.

Eda Sükan

Bridging Pragma-Dialectics and Multimodal Discourse Analysis: Reconstructing Arguments from Short-Form Videos 

This presentation proposes a methodological approach for reconstructing arguments from short-form videos, combining pragma-dialectics with multimodal discourse analysis. Three interrelated analytical issues are addressed: whether non-verbal material can convey propositional content, how argumentative components can be identified within multimodal artefacts,  and how such content should be represented for analytical purposes. Because multimodal artefacts lack the grammatical and lexical conventions that constrain interpretation in verbal discourse, their reconstruction relies more heavily on pragmatic inferencing and is therefore more susceptible to interpretive variability. The goal of integrating discourse analytic methods, such as Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), is precisely to ground these inferences systematically, rendering the inferential structure of multimodal content explicit in a controlled and transparent manner. The value of this interdisciplinary connection is demonstrated through an example reconstruction of an Instagram reel opposing breed-specific legislation, in which the interplay of audio and visual modalities conveys explicit and implicit argumentation. By modularizing the analytical task across disciplines, the presentation offers a systematic procedure for reconstructing arguments from short-form videos in the context of public controversies. 

Marta Marcora

Critical Questions and Endoxa in the AMT

This talk presents work in progress at a very preliminary stage and aims to open a discussion on how critical questions might be formulated within the framework of the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT), with particular attention to the role of endoxa in the analysis and evaluation of multimodal rationalizations of soft hate speech. Given that covert forms of hatred and discrimination rely on implicit inferential strategies circulated through the interplay of multiple semiotic modes (Serafis & Wildfeuer, 2025), their critical assessment depends on reconstructing the contextual premises that underpin and sustain discriminatory reasoning, namely the dominant values and knowledge in context (endoxa), that connect the factual premise (datum) to the first conclusion/minor premise (Rigotti and Greco 2019: 207–246). This talk is situated within ongoing methodological efforts to derive critical questions from the four core components of the AMT (Palmieri, 2024). 

Palmieri, R. (2024). From loci to critical questions: an AMT approach to argument evaluation. Insights from the domain of corporate controversies. In: 24th Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument, Hagen, Germany

Rigotti, E., & Greco, S. (2019). Inference in argumentation : a topics-based approach to argument schemes. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04568-5

Serafis, D., & Wildfeuer, J. (2025). “Studying Soft Hate Speech Online: Synthesising Approaches from Multimodality Research and Argumentation Theory.” In Imagery of Hate Online, edited by Matthias J. Becker, Marcus Scheiber and Uffa Jensen. Berlin: De Gruyter.