ALIEN WAYS OF KNOWING AND BEING: Speculations from the Lives of Earthly Non-Human Animals

Human ontology and epistemology are bound inextricably together. Both are based on, or at least significantly conditioned by, our use of language. We tend to assume that something is knowable (or significant) if it can be framed in language, and unknowable (or insignificant) if it cannot. The places and ideas we inhabit - and therefore our mode of being - are creatures of our language. Our type of language is powerful and (for some purposes) very useful. It is not surprising that it has been favoured by natural selection. But our linguistic ways of articulating and constructing the world are not the only ways. Arguably our language means that we know much less about the way the world really is than we would know without it: that it means that we limit dangerously (to the amount language can accommodate) the amount of data we process in deciding what sort of place the world is; that language makes us self-referential and self-reverential. Our language embodies and perpetuates many sensory and other biases. Vision, cognition and language, for instance, are in an alliance that excludes many other sensory modalities. We say ‘I see’ when we mean ‘I understand’. But there are many other (non-linguistic and non-visually dominated) ways of articulating the world and thus our way of being in the world. An olfactory landscape, for instance, behaves in a very different way to a visual landscape, and visually dominated ways of invoking it have to be abandoned. This chapter draws on work on terrestrial animal ‘languages’ and non-human ways of understanding the world in order to speculate about how non-terrestrial entities might know and be.