Monday 12th: Propaganda, Pornography, Pictures, and Persuasion
It is a curious fact about the philosophical literatures on both propaganda and pornography that they tend to talk about these phenomena as if they were primarily linguistic. Yet by far most pornography today is pictorial and most propaganda has a significant pictorial component. This paper aims to shift the focus in the conversations to pictures and begins to think through some of the implications of this shift singulair dosage. In particular, I’ll be developing a peculiarly pictorial model of persuasion that better suits the work that pornography and propaganda can do. Along the way, I’ll use some examples of highly persuasive pictures from the Italian Renaissance.