Il capitolo ricostruisce il dibattito sulla comunicazione animale dai tardi anni CInquanta al presente, identificando come tappe nodali l'affermazione della zoosemiotica (legata al nome di Sebeok), lo scontro teorico suscitato dall'avvento della teoria chomskyane, la formazione di un paradigma cognitivo applicato alla mente e al comportamento comunicativo degli animali non umani.
Notes on semiotics and ethology: a (partially interrrupted diagolgue. The success of the chomskyan paradigm, combined with the anthropocentric turn of semiotics, has determined, since the seventies, a sort of divorce between semiotic studies and the ethological research. However, ethology, especially in its variant known as ‘cognitive’ ethology, has continued to use semiotic terminology in its approach to the communicative behavior of non-human animals.
After an initial interest in a zoosemiotic perspective, European semiotics focused exclusively on human language, relegating the communicative performances of non-human animal species below the "semiotic threshold" (Eco 1975). However, ethological research in recent decades has made enormous progress that has shown the sophistication of the communication codes of many species (firstly primates and apes, but also dolphins, crows and other species phylogenetically distant from Homo sapiens) .
Are the communication systems of non-human animals endowed with the property of symbolism or are they merely expressions of emotional states? The question has pervaded the philosophical debate at least since the time of Descartes and is now abundantly discussed in the field of cognitive ethology. In this paper, the topic is summarized both from the philosophical point of view (reconsidering Brentan’s notion of 'intentionality', often referred to by ethologists, too) and from the experimental point of view, referring to some well-known case-studies of the last decades.
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