The most sophisticated level of spatial awareness is usually described in terms of possession of a cognitive map.

spatial
Navigation and Spatial Reasoning 203
awareness. The most sophisticated level of spatial awareness is usually
described in terms of possession of a cognitive map. One way in which
this point is often put is that possession of a cognitive map goes hand
in hand with the possibility of identifying places on an environmentcentered
(allocentric), rather than body-centered (egocentric), frame of
reference. Many have thought that the representation of space through a
cognitive map is a crucial element in the detachment from practical concerns
that allows us to anchor the coordinates of our spatial thought on
something other than our own bodies. One philosopher who has placed
much stress on this thought is Gareth Evans, who sees possession of a
cognitive map as one of the crucial differentia between engagement in a
spatial world and representation of a spatial world: “The network of
input-output connections which underlie the idea of an egocentric space
could never be regarded as supporting a way of representing space (even
egocentric space) if it could not be brought by the subject into coincidence
with some such larger spatial representation of the world as is constituted
by a cognitive map” (Evans 1982, 163). But what does the expression
‘cognitive map’ mean in claims like these?
One thing that seems clear is that Evans’s use of the expression ‘cognitive
map’ must be very different from what Gallistel takes it to mean,
namely the storage of geometric information in the nervous system. Gallistel
makes a very plausible case that possession of a cognitive map in his
sense is not at all restricted to creatures capable of what Evans would
recognize as representation of a spatial world. Chapters 5 and 6 of The
Organization of Learning (Gallistel 1990) defend the thesis that all animals
from insects upward deploy cognitive maps with the same formal
characteristics in navigating around in the environment. Gallistel argues
that the cognitive maps that control movement in animals all preserve the
same set of geometric relations within a system of earth-centered (geocentric)
coordinates. These relations are metric relations, the relations studied
by metric geometry, of which Euclidean geometry is the best-known
example. The distinctive feature of a metric geometry is that it preserves
all the geometric relations between the points in the coordinate system.
Gallistel’s thesis is thus in direct opposition to the widely held view that
the spatial representations of lower animals are weaker than those of
204 Chapter 8
higher animals because they can record only a limited set of geometric
relations. He maintains that, although the cognitive maps of lower animals
have far fewer places on them, they record the same geometrical
relations between those points as humans and other higher animals.
Moreover, he offers a uniform account of how such metric cognitive maps
are constructed in the animal kingdom:
I suggest that the surveying procedures by which animals construct their cognitive
map of their environment may be broken down into two inter-related sets of processes,
which together permit the construction of geocentric metric maps. One set
of processes constructs a metric representation in egocentric coordinates of the
relative positions of currently perceptible points, lines and surfaces—a representation
of what is perceived from one’s current vantage point. The other process,
dead reckoning, provides a representation in geocentric coordinates of the vantage
points and the angles of view (headings). Combining geocentric representations
of vantage points and angles of view with egocentric representations of the
segment of the world perceived from each vantage point yields a representation
of the shape of the behaviourally relevant environment in a system of coordinates
anchored to the earth, a geocentric cognitive map. (Gallistel 1990, 106)
Dead reckoning (the process of keeping track of changes in velocity over
time) yields an earth-centered representation of vantage points and angles
of view that combines with current perceptual experience of the environment
to yield an earth-centered cognitive map.
The clear implication of Gallistel’s account of animal representation is
that his sense of ‘cognitive map’ is of no use in distinguishing different
forms of spatial awareness, since it is presupposed by just about every
form of spatial awareness. How about the other senses of the expression?
Another commonly encountered way of understanding ‘cognitive map’ is
in imagistic terms, as a mental picture that the mind consults to solve
navigational problems, but this is even more clearly a nonstarter. When
we put to one side the imagistic and subpersonal understandings of the
notion of a cognitive map, we seem to be left with a notion that is rather
amorphous. Gareth Evans offers the following definition: “a representation
in which the spatial relations of several distinct things are simultaneously
represented” (1982, 151). This is not very helpful. Despite Evans’s
insistence on seeing possession of a cognitive map as the key to objective
thought about space, this definition does not distinguish between egocentric
and allocentric frames of reference. And it is no more helpful to be
Navigation and Spatial Reasoning 205
told by E. C. Tolman, who coined the phrase, that a cognitive map is the
mental analogue of a topographic map, for this is only as clear as the
notion of a mental analogue.
As this brief examination of the concept of a cognitive map shows, it is
a concept rather unsuited to the task of helping explain what it is to have
an integrated representation of one’s environment over time. The clearest
sense of a cognitive map is Gallistel’s construal in terms of the storage of
metric information in the nervous system, but this is not going to explain
how possession of an integrated representation of the environment over
time differs from other forms of spatial representation. None of the other
senses of ‘cognitive map’ is really clear enough to explain anything. The
conclusion to draw from this, I think, is that to make any progress on the
notion of an integrated representation of the environment over time, we
need to proceed in broadly functional or operational terms. That is, we
need to consider what forms and types of navigational behavior should
be taken as appropriate criteria for the ascription to a creature of an integrated
representation of the environment. I shall go on to discuss four
such types of navigational ability in the next section. Before moving on,
however, there is an important loose end to tie up.
In the previous section I argued for the importance of developing a
position midway between the cognitivist account of spatial reasoning favored
by Christopher Peacocke and the theory of causally indexical spatial
awareness favored by John Campbell. But it might be asked at this
point if the proposal to consider what it is to possess an integrated representation
of the environment over time in broadly functional and operational
terms is compatible with that stated aim. I argued that Campbell’s
notion of an awareness that is exhausted in its implications for action and
perception is not rich enough to capture the spatial-awareness component
of a nonconceptual point of view. But it is open to a defender of Campbell’s
position to argue that construing spatial representation in functional
or operational terms is simply offering up a causally indexical
account under another name. Surely, it might be argued, a functional or
operational construal of spatial representation suffers from precisely the
same defects attributed to the view that spatial representation is exhausted
in its implications for action and perception, simply because it