Reflections on reading: words and pictures and law

Abstract

The practice of law today is awash with pictures of all kinds – from those that begin conceptually like graphs, diagrams or flow charts to those that originate in perception, like photographs, or those that emerge from the actions of technology, like animations and fMRI. Pictures are used as evidence, demonstratives, and for argument. The legal academy has yet seriously to come to grips with the changes that this infusion of the visual means for legal thinking and rhetoric. This article explores the intellectual implications of picturing in a discipline that has thought of itself as preeminently about the use of words and their linear logics. To do this, the author has sought out eye movement research, asking the question: Do we read pictures differently from words? If so, what are the implications of this as understood both in cognitive terms and in cultural terms? That is, can the differences in perceptual behaviour be seen as offering clues to differences in cognitive behaviour? Existing knowledge seems to answer these questions in the affirmative, which means that the deeply held cultural bias that maintains that only words containing thought needs revision. This article concludes with reflections on some benefits that adjustments to our understanding might give to legal thinkers.

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