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So body language and facial expression tell you nothing about a person?
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Sure they do but they can often be misleading. And I don't need to go through countless situations in which body language or expressions can and often times do signify something other than what was originally intended. I don't need to call in the paddy wagon for the guy who has just won a million dollars: despite the fact that after discovering that he has won a million dollars, he is running around, yelling, and ripping his clothes off. Yet someone else, unaware of the context, might just do that. Image or appearance has to be contextualized in some way and there can be no way in which an image ought to signify exclusively and definitively one thing independently of the social/linguistic means of identification.
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It comes back to the old "Is the mind inside the body or is the body inside the mind?" argument. Your body is as much a part of you as some intangible sense of inner self.
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I won't deny that the body is a part of the person. But the identity of the person isn't exhausted in his or her bodily appearance/attributes. Keep in mind that (and this is important) I'm also not making any metaphysical claims about an intangible self. How a person acts, carries himself, or relates to other individuals are all
observable things.
