Metaphorical Reasoning Together: Embodied Conceptualization in a Community of Philosophical Inquiry

International audienceIn this paper, we show that taking an embodied stance at cognitive moves as not limited to speech acts but including concrete sensori-motor actions, either isolated or coverbal gestures, enriches our understanding of collaborative reasoning. More specifically, we follow the bimodal co-construction and circulation of metaphors in a Community of Philosophical Inquiry (Lipman, 2003). We show how the participants used many source concepts in the exploration of the abstract concept of ‘thinking’, and were able to build a conceptual synthetizing metaphor. Our results support a bimodal metaphors salience hypothesis: metaphorical gestures play a great role in making reasoning visible to others and therefore fostering collaborative learning