A Critical Companion to Zoosemiotics

ion Abstraction, or generalization, is the ability of representing an event/entity in terms of general qualities/characteristics, independently from concrete realities, specific instances or actual objects. In semiotic terms, to abstract means to be able to consider an object as a token of a given type, to mentally represent that type, and finally, on the basis of that representation, to recognize other tokens of the same type. For example, abstracting Hard Times as part of the type “Dickens’ novels” allows us also to recognize A Tale of Two Cities within the same whole. The process applies also to the capacity of spotting the type even when the second token is merely a sign of the first one, or is manifest through another medium. In the previous example, not only an actual hard copy of Hard Times can be recognized as Dickens’ novel, but also an electronic file of it, or even a picture of the cover appearing in a magazine. Evidently, thus, abstraction closely relates to such concepts as >mind, >mental representation, and >symbolic >semiosis. In psychological studies, abstraction is defined as a “higher brain function”, and therefore has been long considered a >species-specific human feature. Already in the first decades of the twentieth century, however, and even more effectively starting from the 1950s, an increasing number of ethological studies (Hsiao 1929, Wolfe 1936, Cowles 1937, Köhler 1943, 1949, 1952, >Eibl-Eibsfeldt 1951, Rensch and Dücker 1959, Rensch 1965, Lehr 1967, >Goodall 1968, among others), in both natural and experimental contexts, found out that abstract representations are extremely common among non human animals. Subjects of such studies included pigeons, toads, elephants, parrots, ravens, squirrels, rats, monkeys, cats, and of course great apes. The difference between the first and the second type of abstraction is pretty marked. If the mere ability to attribute a token to a type can be easily inducted with a simple behavioristic stimulus-response technique (after all, the infamous Pavlov’s experiments were producing in the dogs nothing else than a capacity to generalize), at the same time, from a semiotic point of view, more relevant are those 2 As it will be soon clear, most room in this glossary has been given to concepts and scholars that had no specific opportunity to be thoroughly discussed in the other parts of this companion, or for specific portions of general topics that were dealt with, which had to be overlooked despite their pertinence within the zoosemiotic discussion. The remaining entries, often shorter in length, are always provided with an indication of where, in the book, they were treated more in detail. 3 A third reason for differences in the entries’ length, or for presence/absence, are of course the personal scientific choices of the author. This companion, it shall be reminded, is “critical”: it presents a view on zoosemiotics that is hopefully coherent in itself, but that is far from being complete, encyclopaedic and impartial. Priority was given to those concepts and scholars that were perceived to require more attention (because they were not previously given enough of it, or because they were given a different form of attention, that this companion claims was not fully appropriate). 4 Omissions due to author’s limitations in knowledge and competencies, finally, will certainly appear, and – regretfully – not only rarely. For these, the author can only apologize to the readers, and hope that his work will at least serve as a basis for a further, more accurate job.