**Acknowledgements**

*Cognitive and Intermedial Semiotics*

'protected values'.

directed processing, self-directed processing, and 'mental time travel'. These zones are activated when individuals deal with narratives involving the above-mentioned

describing biological reality; they are 'evolutionary stories'.

sequences or 'evolutionary narratives'.

**4. Conclusions**

Then, some brain regions activate when social emotions and moral dilemmas are present, and those regions are the suspects of playing a critical role in representing complex emotions dependent on the knowledge of social conventions. These studies were performed in humans [26], but nevertheless we can wonder if similar processes could operate in other animals' sign evaluations. Indeed, these brain regions activated when social emotions and moral dilemmas are present could be also activated—in a 'mirror neurons' sort of way—when processing information or judging attitudes and behaviours of their species, helping and/or biasing our interpretations. The above-mentioned facts and interpretations could be taken as evidence, or at least as a probability, that our brains and the brains of other species are prepared (probably pre-wired) by evolution to process information acquired through their senses and interpret it with the aid of an emotional (empathic) and natural (external) framework, as when interpreting a narrative or a story, mainly pointing to meaning interpretation through a sort of (if not a real) hermeneutic process. Possibly this kind of processing is not optimal (as some of our theories—wrongly, from my point of view—seem to model) but are more real and more naturally 'unpredictable', better

Bundgaard [10] supports that narratives we compose from our observation of other subjects' behaviour are not arbitrary, because not any pattern of movements can trigger an 'acceptable' interpretation (for the meaning-making system of the interpreter) except if they are temporally correlated in a specific way. If the right temporal correlations are presented in the sequence of units proffered by an emitter, a narrative 'scene' is built, and the information contained in it could be perceptually extracted constituting (or at least appearing as) goal-oriented actions. These facts imply, at the same time, that some (intentional or probably intentional) actions seem to be built through characteristic modes or styles of 'presentation' allowing a sort of direct perception of intentionality or causality that will end, depending on its range of action, in a meaning-making process for the analysis of behavioural

Taking all the previous arguments into account, we can examine many of the parallelisms existing among classical behavioural analysis [6] and narrative (structural) analysis [4] that lead to assume that when describing and interpreting animal behaviour and/or communication, we are, in fact, telling (reconstructing) 'evolutionary stories'. Importantly, the fact of telling stories does not mean that our interpretations of animal behaviour obtained by these methods/means are not scientific, because the capability of understanding behaviour and signals of animals in a scientific way does not depend on the higher or lower level of mathematical formality of the description or interpretation, but on the ability to understand/ decode the information present in the 'stories' animals tell through their behaviour,

and in the contextualization of those stories through hermeneutic analysis.

The idea of Umwelt introduced by von Uexküll is fundamental in our possibilities of interpreting animal behaviour and animal signals [27]. This is because, the capabilities of meaning-making in a signalling system each species has depend on their sensory capabilities, and the relationship between perception and action highlighted by the Umwelt concept—is related to their sensory abilities (also part of the Umwelt). In a similar way to what Cognitive Linguistics does essentially for

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The author wants to acknowledge partial funding for the publication of this manuscript by PEDECIBA (Uruguay).
