Joining together for understanding

Abstract

It is a widespread opinion that the driving force behind any evolutionary process is the exchange of information with the surrounding environment, an exchange that occurs during the entire life cycle. Our existence is filled with communicative acts; even silence or our absence from a situation transmits a message, informs, and communicates. Everything is communication and the development of communicative competence is closely related to the development of culture in human beings. It follows that human behaviour does not only comprise adaptive interactions with the surrounding environment, typical of every living being, but also of relationships developed in a context constructed around conventions, values, opportunities and constraints, and with each acting subject’s personal contribution, which plays a part in determining the progress of the communicative process. In human beings, in fact, semiotic ability is not limited to satisfying primary needs; in humans even those needs related to the emotional sphere and to the fulfilment of dreams become inalienable. For human beings the use of representative semiotic codes, a symbolic universe aimed at ascribing sense and value to experience, to each individual’s background, not only in factual terms, but also in metaphorical terms, comes into play. Citing Fabbri Montesano and Munari: «Thinking in images and thinking in stories presupposes a particular relationship between constructing ideas and having sentiments. It is in thinking through images and stories that the individual can save the unity of his/her being, producing new forms of relations and knowledge». Metaphors are in fact used to communicate new ways of thinking since they are simultaneously magical and logical, subjective and objec-