Time and Temporality: Linguistic Distribution in Human Life-games

While clock-time can be used to clarify facts, all living systems construct their own temporalities. Having illustrated the claim for foxtail grasses, it is argued that, with motility and brains, organisms came to use temporalities that build flexibility into behavior. With the rise of human culture, individuals developed a knack of using linguistic distribution to link metabolism with collective ways of assessing and managing experience. Of human temporal management, the best known case is the mental time travel enabled by, among other functions, autobiographical memory. One contribution of this special issue is to show many ways in which temporality connects up circumstances, goals, perception, attention and modes of recall. It can be hypothesized that temporalities evolve because the relevant skills reduce uncertainties. Using cases from blogging, problem solving and doctor-patient interaction, we find that, in each case, parties shift between close attention to the lived situation and using resources--especially wordings--to manage temporality. It is concluded that the multi-scalar nature of language enables individuals to orchestrate their lives in ways that are, at once, social, cognitive and subjective.