Esprimere i significati, esprimere le emozioni. Alcune considerazioni tra Wittgentstein, William James e Luigi Perissinotto

In his work, Luigi Perissinotto has constantly claimed that meaning is not primarily a mental state or a mental entity and that meaning should be understood as resulting from practices that happen between speakers, who basically share common activities and a language. This thesis is grounded in his reading of Wittgenstein's texts, and, I argue, it can be correlated with Wittgenstein's own somewhat analogous thought that bodily gestures - particularly changes in the face and movements of the hands and the whole body - are not expressions of emotions in the sense of outward manifestations of allegedly inner states of mind. In this paper, I contend that Wittgenstein's antimentalism may have been partly influenced by William James's claim in the Principles of Psychology that emotions should not be interpreted as psychic contents, that would be prior to their manifestations through bodily expressions, although Wittgenstein disagrees with James' alternative formulation, whereby emotions are said to be the feeling of bodily changes as they occur.