Abstract

In order to analyse pictures shared in WhatsApp groups of Jair Bolsonaro supporters, I will explore the idea that the act of sending someone a picture through social media performs a speech act. Thus we can separate the utterance act, the locutionary act, the illocutionary act, and the perlocutionary act. The pictures analysed were collected from January to September 2019, using the WhatsApp Monitor. My main philosophical argument will be in section 3, in which I develop the idea of pictorial speech acts and its conceptual bases. To understand the communicational role of pictures it is necessary to supplement picture theories with a communicative act theory based on speech act. The development of the general outline of visual pragmatics is the main philosophical contribution envisaged in this paper. My last step it to argue that there are at least three forms of naivety that render the receivers prone to the uptake of the illocutionary act performed: aesthetic naivety, communicational naivety, and epistemic naivety.