Estimations, plans, narratives: how non human animals deal with future and “Possible worlds”

Abstract

The possibility of imagining and planning the future (or, more generally, to create “possible worlds”) has often been considered a human species-specific trait, or – to put it with Peter Singer – one of the «ultimate signs of human distinction». When approached within a humanistic environment (particularly in philosophy, linguistics and semiotics), the main argument brought in support of this assumption is that such a capacity is expressed via three major (and again, supposedly-exclusive of humankind) characteristics of language: 1) Distant space-time semiosis, or the ability to keep track, transmit and reconstruct both recent and remote past events and places, and the ability to articulate projects and expectations regarding both immediate and remote places and future events. 2) Narrativeness, or the general capacity of accessing and describing alien Umwelten, either imaginary or not. 3) Linking signs, that is, para-signs that do not refer to any other existing entity apart from themselves, and whose function is to create meaningful relations among signs that, by contrast, stand for something else than only themselves. As reasonable as such argumentation can be, there are at least two major points that expose it to criticism: the assumption that such characteristics are exclusive of human language, and cannot be produced by other communication and/or modelling systems, and the consequent implication of human uniqueness in the cognitive production of the concepts of possible worlds and future in particular. The present article has the methodological goal to systematize these notions into an operative, interdisciplinary framework that is informed of at least semiotic, cognitive-ethological, psychological and narratological research, and – perhaps more importantly – the theoretical goal to renegotiate the terms of this discussion into a more accurate, hopefully not anthropocentrically-biased, perspective.