Research in conversational hand gesturing shows an array of philosophical senses of intersubjectivity. Gesturing is interpersonally rational, as demonstrated in studies linking gesturing to common ground achievements and effects and to markings of communicative intent. Gesturing is an ecological and interactional activity through which copresent interlocutors codetermine their own social and environmental relatings, building as well as attending to a shared world. Gesturing is an intercorporeal experience central to what it means to live as linguistic bodies. Taken together, research indicates that hand gesturing even as a variegated phenomenon offers insight into how language works. The full story of intersubjectivity and attendant features of recognition, interpretation, normativity, conventionality, and reference begins and ends with actual bodies interacting. As these matters concern the core of pragmatic philosophy, gesture research has radical relevance for all language theorists. An enactive approach to intersubjectivity and language offers a framework for making this case.

Dewey's thought is central to the organicist tradition, which views habit as “‘a primary ontological phenomenon’, shaping the person as a whole and traversing a continuum from the individual to the social, from embodied intentionality to conscious reflection”. This view enjoys a mutually supportive relationship with the theory of linguistic bodies, a nonrepresentational, world-involving account of languaging as a type of embodied social agency. Everything that a linguistic body does and thinks is conditioned by her linguistic habits. Paradoxically, each unique life is built out of the sense-making acts of others. Through constitutive openness to others’ perspectives, habits that define linguistic bodies call forth certain futures. The future depends on which utterances a community privileges and with whom it dialogues. Considering the global climate emergency, I question how we can actually change our future by disrupting the habits that currently comprise what Dewey calls “the endless chain of humanity.”