Meaning is a Physiognomy: Wittgenstein on Seeing Words and Faces

Artículo

Resumen *

The second part of Philosophical Investigations and other contemporary writings contain abundant material dedicated to the examination of visual perception, along the lines of similarities and differences manifested in the use of concepts such as "seeing as", "seeing aspects", "noticing the aspect", "aspect blindness", among other related ones. However, their application to phenomena such as face perception and word perception, and similarities between the latter two, has not received proper attention in the literature. My first aim is identifying the features pertaining perceptual (and more widely, experiential) relationships we have with written language, showing in what ways they are strongly linked with some proper features of facial perception. In other words, I will try to show how the phenomenology of reading is akin to the phenomenology of facial perception or physiognomy. Based on all this, my interpretative hypothesis is that, in Wittgenstein?s view, the features shared by face and word perception are more deeply related than via a mere analogy; hence they might contribute to explain, in the case of words, a variety of specific semantic, perhaps semantic-pragmatic, phenomena, that should be included in an appropriate clarification of the varieties of use in natural languages. Información suministrada por el agente en SIGEVA