Basil Vassilicos
[email protected] Philosophy of Language in the Brentano Tradition A. Dewalque, S. Richard, C. Gauvry., ed. London: Palgrave, (forthcoming) WUNDT AND BÜHLER ON GESTURAL EXPRESSION: FROM PSYCHO-PHYSICAL MIRRORING TO THE DIACRISIS INTRODUCTION Contemporary research on gestures - as an empirical, interdisciplinary body of work involving anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology – can be characterised as having a couple of overarching traits. In the first place, it seems disposed toward a kind of empirical but also egalitarian prudence when it comes the relation of gestures to those communication phenomena typically designated as having to do with language or speech. With increased attention being given to gestured [e.g. signed] languages as robust and wholly developed communicative systems in their own right (i.e. not merely derivative of other linguistic systems) has also come a reluctance to reduce gestural expression to verbal expression, or vice versa.1 A second feature has to do with how gestures are delineated as ‘integral’ phenomena for scientific investigation in their own right, namely as fully fledged ‘partners’ if not self-sufficient components within any human communicative interaction, with the potential if not requirement to contribute just as much as that other much more well- known and oft-studied partner, i.e. verbal language. That is, there is a strong focus today on the multi-modality of human communicative action, meaning, depending on one’s point of view, co-speech gestures or co-gestured speech. A simple example can illustrate this multimodal approach to gestures and language. Two people are bent over a bit of exposed dirt in a field, in discussion with each other about something they are excavating.2 In so communicating, they might use words, but also their hands and the tools they are holding.