Of course, not all such acts of recognition will involve an awareness

ob-
170 Chapter 7
ject and a previous experience of it, it brings with it an awareness that
what is being experienced has an existence transcending the present moment.
Of course, not all such acts of recognition will involve an awareness
that what is being experienced exists independently of being experienced.
Reference to a previous experience can occur in the absence of any awareness
that the object of experience exists unperceived, as is the case, for
example, when a particular sensation or subjective feeling is recognized.
It is certainly possible to recognize an experience as one previously experienced
without any grasp of the distinction between experience and what
it is experience of. Clearly, the recognitional capacities must be exercised
on something extraneous to the experiences themselves. But what?
Physical objects are obvious candidates, and any creature that could
recognize physical objects would have experience that involves drawing
the right sort of distinctions. However, one might wonder whether the
distinctions could be drawn at a level of experience that does not involve
objects, and in fact it is hard to see how there could be such a thing as a
nonconceptual point of view if the distinctions could not be drawn at a
more primitive level. Strawson (following Kant) is surely right to assume
that a full understanding of the nature of objects comes only with a core
set of conceptual abilities. It is important, then, that there should be
“things” that can be recognized but that are not physical objects, but
what are they? One natural suggestion to make here would be that such
“things” are places. The thought here is that the fundamentally spatial
nature of the experienced world provides the most basic material for the
exercise of basic recognitional capacities. The experience of creatures
who cannot manipulate concepts in the manner required to think about
an objective spatial world of mind-independent objects can nonetheless
reflect the spatiality of their lived environment in terms of the primitive
capacity to think about places.
There is an obvious problem, though, that this proposal has to deal
with. The identification of places and the identification of objects seem
so inextricably bound together that it is not clear how there can be reidentification
of places without thought about objects. The connection between
objects and places has been thought to hold in both directions. It
is certainly clear that the criteria of identity for any given material object
involve spatiotemporal continuity, and that if I want to establish whether
Points of View 171
an object at one time is identical with another object at another time,
then one of the criteria that has to be satisfied is that they should either
be at the same place or that there should be a plausible spatial route between
the two places that they occupy. But many have also argued that
the interdependence holds also in the opposite direction, that the criteria
of identity for places necessarily depend on the criteria of identity for
objects (Strawson 1959, Quinton 1973). It is important, however, to be
clear on what the terms of the debate are here. One question that might
be asked here is whether we, as concept-exercising and language-using
creatures, could have anything like the understanding of space and spatial
relations that we actually do have without having the capacity to think
about objects and to employ those thoughts about objects in identifying
places and their relations. But what is relevant here is the more general
question of whether any capacity for place reidentification could be available
to creatures who lack the capacity to think in terms of enduring material
objects occupying spatial positions (Campbell 1993).
The problem arises, of course, because places themselves cannot be recognised
simpliciter. They must be recognised in terms of what occupies
them. So, to rebut the objection that there cannot be place reidentification
without object reidentification, it will be necessary to offer an alternative
account of the possible occupants that could make place reidentification
possible. It seems to me that, far from material objects being the only
such occupants, there are (at least) two distinct alternatives.
One alternative has already been discussed at some length in chapter
3, where I noted that recent work in developmental psychology strongly
supports the view that young infants parse their visual perceptions into
bounded segments, about whose behavior they have certain expectations,
which expectations nonetheless do not qualify as the perception of objects
(still less as involving mastery of the concept of an object). I suggested
in the final section of chapter 4 that by defining the concept of an
object* we could capture at a nonconceptual level how the perceived array
can be parsed into spatially extended segments that are more primitive
than objects. Drawing on this, I find it natural to propose that objects*
could have an important role to play in place reidentification.
We can make a start on the second alternative by noting the view that
there are levels of language use that do not involve identifying reference to
172 Chapter 7
particular objects (Strawson 1959, Campbell 1993). What is often termed
“feature-placing” discourse characterizes the world in terms of features
in a manner notably different from the more familiar subject-predicate
discourse. Whereas subject-predicate discourse depends upon identifying
reference to material particulars, and these are then ascribed qualities or
properties (which are sortal universals, appropriate for identifying and
classifying material particulars), feature-placing discourse deploys universal
terms that are not sortal universals and that are not predicated of
material particulars. ‘It is raining’ is a case in point, as is ‘There is food’.
In neither of these cases is there a particular thing of which certain properties
are predicated, nor are the universal terms involved the sort of terms
that can be used to classify particulars. Quine’s distinction between mass
terms and count terms is very much to the point here (1960, sections
19–20). Mass terms are terms that refer cumulatively to general types of
stuff, like water, wood, or rain. Any bit of wood is wood, as is any collection
of bits of woods, and the question of how many is not an appropriate
one to ask once the presence of wood has been identified. In contrast,
count terms must be provided in order for things to be counted and numbered.
They pick out particular things.1 We can understand featureplacing
discourse as a form of language use that operates at the level of
mass terms and has no count terms, with the important proviso that the
range of available mass terms in such feature-placing discourse is not restricted
to those terms that function as mass terms in our own far more
complex language.2
This notion of primitive feature-placing discourse can be modified to
help us understand how place reidentification might take place without
thought about objects. Let us assume a fairly primitive creature that nonetheless
possesses the capacity to recognize features, such as warmth or
food. Let us assume, moreover, that such a creature can navigate its way
around the environment in a manner that is not entirely stimulus-driven
(according to the criteria discussed in chapter 4). In navigating its way
around the environment, it returns to particular places, and this can be
made comprehensible in terms of certain features (warmth, food, water,
etc.) that exist at those places and that it is appropriate to describe the
creature as detecting. Such a situation it is compelling to describe as
one in which spatial behaviour is driven by information about features