ABSTRACT
From the point of view of neuropsychology there are no gestures. In other words, gestures are not a coherent category. By this I mean that there is no center for gestures in the brain, there is no form of brain damage which selectively abolishes the ability to gesture. Rather, different kinds of gestures are differentially affected in different circumstances, never primarily but always as part of a more general, underlying processing deficit. That is important because to my mind the brain is the touchstone of the biological reality of categories. In the case of language the brain tells us that category is real because there are parts of the brain which subserve language, and one can suffer a selective language loss. Gestures cannot be compared to language in that way. They comprise bits and pieces of different behaviors which we have chosen so to name. The same applies to semiotics. There is no brain center for semiotic behavior. There is no lesion which strips acts of meaning or of signaling value, leaving their representations preserved in the brain. So we are dealing with categories which are useful abstractions but do not delineate packages of the mind. Rather than define gesture, which for these reasons is a sterile thing to do, we shall discuss a variety of behaviors which people have called gestures.
