“Gesture, a tool for synthetic reasoning”.

In this paper I propose to read and understand gestures as logical tools within a synthetic paradigm of knowledge. This interpretation of gesture is drawn from a new pragmatist reading of reasoning in general, and synthetic reasoning in particular. Complete gestures are actions with a beginning and an end that bear a meaning. It is our regular way to embody vague ideas into singular actions with general meaning. The tool is forged by a dense blending of icons, indices, and symbols and by a complexity of phenomenological characteristics as feelings, actual actions, general concepts and habits (firstness, secondness, and thirdness in Peirce’s phenomenology). The paper illustrates this new way to look at gestures and different kinds of complete and incomplete gestures.