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

Are mental images part of the communicative intention (CI), and therefore of the intended speaker’s meaning (Grice)? Similar questions have been debated in the literature on embodiment. Here we intend to address the issue with special regard to gestures in communication, and especially to representative gestures that seem essentially based on sensory-motor representations. Our line of argument will be twofold. First, we intend to show that gestures contribute to the CIs, as is evident when the speaker is manifestly engaged in making them salient – but it will be important to us that CI is not conscious planning. Second, we argue that gestures contribute to CIs in a genuinely imagistic, not propositional, way. In particular we call into question two arguments in favor of the propositional approach: that images cannot be part of CIs because, respectively, they have no truth-conditional content and are not something on which inferences can be drawn.