Ordinary Thinking about Time

I will describe two non-standard ways of thinking about time. The ?rst is ubiquitous in animal cognition. I will call it ‘phase time’. Suppose for example you consider a hibernating animal. This animal might have representation of the various seasons of the year, and modulate its actions dependent on the season. But it need have no distinction between the winter of one year and the winter of another; it thinks of time only in terms of repeatable phases.

The second non-standard way of thinking about time has been ascribed to children at an early stage in development. I will call it ‘script time’. A ‘script’ or ‘schema’ is representation of the structure of a repeated type of event, such as going to a restaurant, attending a lecture or visiting the doctor. You know what types of event happen in what order. And in script time, you identify temporal locations with respect to events in the script.