Abstract

Embodied cognition shows that language understanding and production are inseparable from speakers’ bodily experience. Twentieth-century philosophy has been largely suspicious of rooting linguistic meaning in speakers’ experience, understood as strictly private and individual. Grounding language into (subjective) experience would lead to the risk of incommunicability, at the basis of Wittgenstein’s well-known argument against «private language». The turn would be in conceiving of experience as non-private. The history of philosophy, namely of aesthetics, indeed offers a «precursor» of such a conception (and hence, of embodied cognition): Kant’s sensus communis. The notion lends valuable insights for the relevant philosophical questions embodied cognition utterly faces