Gesti co-verbali e immagini mentali: i confini dell’intenzione comunicativa

• Main Authors: Emanuela Campisi, Marco Mazzone
• Format: Article
• Language: deu
• Published: Mimesis Edizioni, Milano 2019-08-01
• Series: Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia
• Subjects: Communicative Intentions; Representational Gestures; Imagery; Speaker's Meaning
• Online Access: https://www.rifp.it/ojs/index.php/rifp/article/view/rifp.2019.0016/943

Do mental images form part of a speaker’s communicative intention? This and similar questions have usually been addressed within the framework of embodied cognition. Here, instead, we want to address the question from a different point of view, examining representational gestures, which are characterised by their strong relationship to sensory-motor representations. For this reason, our argument takes two directions. First, we show that representational gestures can form part of a speaker’s communicative intention as, for example, when the speaker overtly makes them salient. However, it is important to point out that being part of a communicative intention is not equivalent to being consciously planned. Secondly, we will argue that the meaning carried by gestures is actually imagistic, and not propositional. To this end, we provide a detailed discussion of two arguments favouring the propositional hypothesis: that images cannot be part of the speaker’s communicative intention because their content is not truth-conditional and because they do not allow us to make inferences. We will show that both these arguments are debatable.