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Living in the Model: The Cognitive Ecology of Time—A Comparative Study

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Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology

Part of the book series: Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics ((SAPERE,volume 8))

Abstract

Time is at once familiar and mysterious, its status in the physical universe being uncertain and contested. Time seems to be fundamental to both biology and to the world of human experience. It seems certain that human beings in all cultures experience time, and have ways of linguistically referring to relations between events in time. It has been proposed by some cognitive scientists that there is a natural, transcultural conceptual domain of time. Cultural conceptions of time, however, vary considerably. I present anthropological linguistic data from a study that my colleagues and I conducted in an indigenous Amazonian community. Concepts of time are cultural and historical constructions, constituted by schematic time interval systems, and embodied in language and culture dependent symbolic cognitive artefacts. “Living in time”, I contend, is to live in a model. Time is both artifactual model and cognitive niche, made possible by the wider biocultural niche of language.

My heartfelt thanks go to my collaborators in the field-based case study described and analyzed in this chapter, Wany Sampaio, Vera da Silva Sinha and Jörg Zinken; to the Amondawa community, for allowing us to share their language and culture; and to the Editor of this volume, Lorenzo Magnani, for his patience and support. I hope that the ideas outlined in this paper meet with the approval of these colleagues and partners in dialogue, while taking sole responsibility for all its defects.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “Symbol” and “symbolic” are notoriously polysemous and contested concepts. In accordance with Karl Bühler’s classification [27], symbolicity is here understood in terms of the semiotic, pragmatic and intersubjective logic of communicative representation [28, 29], not on the typology in the Peircian sense [30] of the relationship between sign and object.

  2. 2.

    This is an important caveat, distancing this analysis from post-modernist theories.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Languages and Literature, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Chris Sinha

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  1. Chris Sinha
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Correspondence to Chris Sinha .

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  1. Department of Humanities Philosophy Section, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy

    Lorenzo Magnani

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Sinha, C. (2014). Living in the Model: The Cognitive Ecology of Time—A Comparative Study. In: Magnani, L. (eds) Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 8. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37428-9_4

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