Towards a Like-Minded Ontology: Gesture and the Embodied Nature of Thought in David Mcneill and Maurice Merleau-Ponty

In this paper I initiate an interdisciplinary dialogue between cognitive psychologist David McNeill's groundbreaking work on gesture and existential-phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's treatment of gesture in The Phenomenology of Perception. McNeill has increasingly turned to Merleau-Ponty in support of the theoretical side of his project of classifying spontaneous narrative gestures. I act as a philosophical mediator between these two different theories in order to bring attention to the provocative but also problematic metaphysical implications of McNeill's theoretical contributions to the study of gesture, contributions which have yet to be taken up by philosophers and yet to be seriously critiqued by other cognitive scientists and embodiment theorists. Merleau-Ponty and McNeill both highlight gesture as a site of bodily meaning and thus as evidence of the embodied origin of linguistic meaning, yet they do not do so in the same way, with the same focus, or even necessarily employing the same understanding of 'gesture'. Clarifying the terms of this conversation and illuminating the diverging ontologies of thought that are at stake in it are crucial first steps to furthering interdisciplinary work on gesture.McNeill's theoretical apparatus of the imagery-language dialectic, the fruitful interplay of gesture and speech in the occurrence of thought, is an attempt to measure thought, to delimit its rise and fall in communicative contexts that are always embodied. McNeill seeks to do this at an existential level; in other words, thought not as disembodied propositional content, but as a moment of living meaning, is at issue. McNeill follows Merleau-Ponty in emphasizing thought's essential nature as bodily expression and co-occurrence with speech and gesture. The particular question of the possibility of speaking without thinking opens up contrasts between the views.In Hand and Mind, McNeill emphasizes the role of gesture in disclosing what is most salient and relevant to a speaker while speaking, i.e., what stands out or has the most communicative dynamism (CD) (220). In Gesture and Thought, McNeill prefers the language of a speaker 'updating her cognitive being;' CD is replaced with the H-Model (after Heidegger). According to either model, an absence of gesture indicates little or no contrast in a speaker's ongoing expressing. As meaning is defined by McNeill solely in terms of contrast, and as thought is an unpacked idea unit that arises as a break from a given context, an absence of gesture - or the cessation of the dialectic and the remainder of "pure verbalism" - indicates an absence of thought. Speech without gesture is "speech without thought" (103).For McNeill, speech and gesture are two modes different in kind - hence the productive tension between them, and hence the stall in thinking that pure verbalization causes. Yet speech is already gesture for Merleau-Ponty, and gesture is the co-occurrence of expression and thought. I bring Merleau-Ponty's own dialectic of sedimented versus spontaneous speech to bear on McNeill's apparatus in order to further unpack this contrast between what gesture and thought are for each thinker and to point to some reconciliation for our understanding of embodied meaning.