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Why do gestures matter? Sensuous cognition and the palpability of mathematical meanings

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Abstract

The goal of this article is to present a sketch of what, following the German social theorist Arnold Gehlen, may be termed “sensuous cognition.” The starting point of this alternative approach to classical mental-oriented views of cognition is a multimodal “material” conception of thinking. The very texture of thinking, it is suggested, cannot be reduced to that of impalpable ideas; it is instead made up of speech, gestures, and our actual actions with cultural artifacts (signs, objects, etc.). As illustrated through an example from a Grade 10 mathematics lesson, thinking does not occur solely in the head but also in and through a sophisticated semiotic coordination of speech, body, gestures, symbols and tools.

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Notes

  1. See e.g. Goldin-Meadow (2003), Kendon (1981, 1993), Kita (2003), McNeill (2005, 2000). For a general overview of gestures and their potential in teaching and learning see Roth (2001).

  2. Another paper dealing with the study of motion with the CBR is Arzarello and Robutti (2004).

  3. Many years ago, Fischbein called attention to the fact that, often, students transform a new problem into a different one in order to fit it into a familiar conceptual model for which they have a solution at hand (Fischbein 1989).

  4. As Rita summarized their ideas, “... this (the graph) is what he did (pointing to Pierre). So, he walked normally, he stopped for like, so many seconds, and then he went back...”.

  5. To avoid misunderstandings and at the risk of repeating myself, I would like to emphasize that, in talking about objectification, I am not referring to conceptual objects of a transcendental ontological nature, but to human-made cultural objects (Radford 2002, 2004, 2006a, b).

  6. For further evidence see also Núñez (2007), Radford, Bardini, & Sabena (2007), and Sabena (in press).

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Acknowledgment

I wish to thank the three reviewers for their insightful comments on a previous version of this paper.

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  1. École des Sciences de l’Éducation, Université Laurentienne, Sudbury, ON, P3E 2C6, Canada

    Luis Radford

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Radford, L. Why do gestures matter? Sensuous cognition and the palpability of mathematical meanings. Educ Stud Math 70, 111–126 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-008-9127-3

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