The Notion of a Nonconceptual Point of View and Primitive

good
Navigation and Spatial Reasoning 219
example of the exercise of the capacity to think about places as persisting
through changes of features or objects located at those places.
8.5 The Notion of a Nonconceptual Point of View and Primitive
Self-Consciousness
Earlier in this chapter I broke the notion of a nonconceptual point of
view down into two main components, which I termed the nonsolipsistic
component and the spatial-awareness component. This chapter has been
primarily concerned with the second of these two components. Let me
begin this section by adding the final details to this structural account of
the notion of a nonconceptual point of view.
The nonsolipsistic component (the distinction between experience and
what that experience is experience of) requires
a. grasping that an object of experience exists independently of a particular
experience of it, which requires
b. grasping that a thing exists at times other than those at which it is
experienced, which requires
c. the exercise of recognitional abilities involving conscious memory,
which is most primitively manifested in
d. feature-based recognition of places.
The spatial-awareness component (putting place recognition to work for
navigational purposes) requires
a. awareness that one is navigating through the environment, which
requires
b. a degree of understanding of the nature of space, which requires
c. a grasp of the distinction between the spatial relations that hold between
places and the spatial relations that hold between things, which is
manifested in navigational behavior that
d. satisfies the following two minimal conditions:
i. not being reducible to particular sequences of bodily movements,
ii. not being driven by sensitivity to features of the environment that
merely covary with spatial features of the environment;
e. and implicates the following three cognitive capacities:
i. the capacity to think about different routes to the same place,
ii. the capacity to keep track of changes in spatial relations between
things caused by one’s own movements relative to those things,
220 Chapter 8
iii. the capacity to think about places independently of the objects*
or features located at those places.
A very natural question to raise when confronted with an apparently bipartite
notion like that just put forward is, In what sense, if any, do the
two components mesh together to form a cognitive ‘natural kind’? An
unsympathetic reader might be inclined to say that the notion of a nonconceptual
point of view has been gerrymandered out of two distinct sets
of cognitive abilities that happen both to involve some notion of place
recognition and place reidentification. But this would be a serious mistake.
To put the point briefly, the significance of the structured notion of
a nonconceptual point of view is that it allows us to understand how the
forms of first-person perceptual content discussed in chapters 5 and 6 can
be put to work to yield a genuine form of primitive self-consciousness.
This is what unites the two central components.
The notion of a nonconceptual point of view brings together the capacity
to register one’s distinctness from the physical environment and various
navigational capacities that manifest a degree of understanding of
the spatial nature of the physical environment. One very basic reason for
thinking that these two elements must be considered together emerges
from a point made at the beginning of the previous chapter: the richness
of the self-awareness that accompanies the capacity to distinguish the self
from the environment is directly proportionate to the richness of the
awareness of the environment from which the self is being distinguished.
So no creature can understand its own distinctness from the physical environment
without having an independent understanding of the nature of
the physical environment, and since the physical environment is essentially
spatial, this requires an understanding of the spatial nature of the physical
environment. But this cannot be the whole story. It leaves unexplained
why an understanding should be required of this particular essential feature
of the physical environment. After all, it is also an essential feature
of the physical environment that it be composed of objects that have both
primary and secondary qualities, but there is no reflection of this in the
notion of a nonconceptual point of view. More is needed to understand
the significance of spatiality.
Let me step back briefly from primitive self-consciousness to consider
the account of self-identifying first-person thoughts given in Gareth
Navigation and Spatial Reasoning 221
Evans’s Varieties of Reference (1982). Evans places considerable stress on
the connection between the sophisticated form of self-consciousness that
he is considering and a grasp of the spatial nature of the world. As far as
Evans is concerned, the capacity to think genuine first-person thoughts
implicates a capacity for self-location, which he construes in terms of a
thinker’s ability to conceive of himself as identical with an element of the
objective order. Though I don’t endorse the particular gloss that Evans
puts on this, the general idea is very powerful. The relevance of spatiality
to self-consciousness comes about not merely because the world is spatial
but also because the self-conscious subject is himself a spatial element of
the world. One cannot be self-conscious without being aware that one is
a spatial element of the world, and one cannot be aware that one is a
spatial element of the world without a grasp of the spatial nature of the
world. Evans tends to stress a dependence in the opposite direction between
these notions:
The very idea of a perceivable, objective spatial world brings with it the idea of
the subject as being in the world, with the course of his perceptions due to his
changing position in the world and to the more or less stable way the world is.
The idea that there is an objective world and the idea that the subject is somewhere
cannot be separated, and where he is is given by what he can perceive.
(Evans 1982, 222)
But the thrust of his work is very much that the dependence holds equally
in the opposite direction.
It seems to me that this general idea can be extrapolated and brought
to bear on the notion of a nonconceptual point of view. What binds together
the two apparently discrete components of a nonconceptual point
of view is precisely the fact that a creature’s self-awareness must be awareness
of itself as a spatial being that acts upon and is acted upon by the
spatial world. Evans’s own gloss on how a subject’s self-awareness is
awareness of himself as a spatial being involves the subject’s mastery of a
simple theory explaining how the world makes his perceptions as they
are, with principles like ‘I perceive that such and such; such and such
holds at P; so (probably) I am at P’ and ‘I am at P; such and such does
not hold at P, so I can’t really be perceiving such and such, even though it
appears that I am’ (Evans 1982, 223). This is not very satisfactory,
though. If the claim is that the subject must explicitly hold these prin-