The trouble with this suggestion, however, is that Campbell’s

primitive
200 Chapter 8
form of the first-person concept, precisely because it denies Peacocke’s
claim that any creature capable of place reidentification must be capable
of explicitly representing itself and its location in its surroundings.
The trouble with this suggestion, however, is that Campbell’s understanding
of causally indexical spatial reasoning is rather orthogonal to
the account I have been developing of the essential features of experience
reflecting a nonconceptual point of view. Campbell calls upon the distinction
between causal indexicality and causal nonindexicality to perform a
variety of tasks and to give concrete sense to a range of other distinctions.
One of these distinctions is that between absolute and egocentric ways of
representing space, where an absolute representation of space is one that
is not explicable in terms of an organism’s interactions with space. Campbell
wants to argue against the pragmatist’s denial that there are any such
absolute representations of space and to defend the view that there are
ways of thinking about space that are completely independent of one’s
engagement with it, where such engagement is construed in navigational
terms. This is all very well but, as usually happens with these “either”/
“or” distinctions, far too many discrete and rather different phenomena
get lumped together on one side of the divide. In particular, Campbell’s
notion of causal indexicality has little or nothing to say about how the
environment must be represented to make different types of navigation
possible (Campbell 1993, 25). Different types of navigation are classified
together because they all presuppose that places are physically significant
in terms of their implications for perception and action. But this glosses
over crucial distinctions, one of which is the distinction between those
forms of navigation that do presuppose an integrated representation of
the environment over time and those forms of navigation that do not. Of
course, one might think that possession of an integrated representation
of the environment over time is available only to creatures who are capable
of representing space absolutely, which for Campbell means that it
is available only to language-using adult humans (Campbell 1993, 25).
But this is surely an empirical claim open to empirical refutation. It is not
something that can be assumed at the beginning of enquiry.
The positions staked out by Peacocke and Campbell provide the framework
for an account of spatial reasoning. Such an account will show, I
hope, how the ability to engage in spatial reasoning can be available to
Navigation and Spatial Reasoning 201
creatures who do not possess the capacity for linguistic self-reference,
without weakening the notion of spatial reasoning so far that it loses
touch with the core of the notion of a nonconceptual point of view. How
can this double challenge be met? Let me return briefly to Peacocke’s characterization
of spatial reasoning. Recall that the crux of spatial reasoning,
as Peacocke defines it, is that it involves building up an integrated representation
of the environment over time. And it is precisely this integrated
representation of the environment that is lacking in Campbell’s conception
of causally indexical spatial comprehension. The contrast that
Campbell draws between causally indexical and causally nonindexical
thought is a contrast between practical engagement with the environment
and detached and reflective contemplation of the environment, and his
discussion of the contrast makes clear that (in his view, at least) the sort
of integrated spatial reasoning under consideration falls on the “detached
and reflective” side of the divide. What is needed is an account of spatial
reasoning invoking a mode of representing the environment that is richer
than what Campbell offers but yet does not involve the sophisticated
skills that Peacocke builds into his notion of spatial reasoning.
If it can be shown that it does indeed make sense to attribute to prelinguistic
creatures an integrated representation of their environment, then
the double challenge will have been met. But how might this be done?
Everything depends, of course, on how the notion of an integrated representation
of the environment is understood, and it is unfortunate that
Peacocke does not go into much detail on this. The first step, therefore,
is to offer a more detailed account of the notion of an integrated representation
of the environment over time. I shall argue in the following section
that this more detailed account is best achieved through considering what
is distinctive of behavior governed by spatial reasoning involving such a
representation—and in particular, through considering what navigational
capacities are available only through such spatial reasoning. The next section
offers an account that emphasizes four such navigational abilities,
citing experimental evidence that shows that those navigational abilities
are available to nonlinguistic creatures. In the final section I make explicit
the implications of this for primitive self-consciousness and illustrate how
such an integrated representation of the environment might emerge from
the perception of affordances (as discussed in chapter 5).
202 Chapter 8
8.3 Cognitive Maps and Integrated Representations of the Environment
Readers familiar with recent work in the philosophy and psychology of
spatial representation will notice the connection between the notion of
an integrated representation of the environment over time and what psychologists
often call a cognitive map. Indeed, it might seem natural to
think that there is no difference between them and that the notion of
possessing an integrated representation of the environment over time is
best elucidated through the notion of a cognitive map. This seems to me
to be a serious mistake, however, for reasons that I try to bring out in
this section.
Here is a definition of what is meant by a cognitive map from one of
the most significant recent works on animal-learning theory: “A cognitive
map is a record in the central nervous system of macroscopic geometric
relations among surfaces in the environment used to plan movements
through the environment” (Gallistel 1990, 103). This conception of a
cognitive map as a record in the nervous system of geometric relations
between surfaces in the environment is not at all what this chapter is
trying to capture. What I am interested in is the spatial-awareness component
of primitive self-consciousness, and that spatial-awareness component
is a personal-level state. Records in the nervous system, however,
are subpersonal states. Of course, as I have argued elsewhere (Bermu´ dez
1995b, 1995d, 1995e), it is a mistake to make a rigid distinction between
personal and subpersonal levels of explanation. It is compelling to think
that for any creature to have the sort of conscious spatial awareness
implicated in primitive self-consciousness, it must have a suitable record
in the nervous system of the geometrical relations between environmental
surfaces. It is equally compelling (at least to my mind) to think that any
adequate explanation of conscious spatial awareness must appeal to
subpersonal facts about the recording of geometric relations in the
nervous system. But the fact remains that these are two very different
things.
One of the factors that makes it tempting to equate conscious spatial
awareness with possession of a cognitive map is that many psychologists
and philosophers who place theoretical weight on cognitive maps do so
within the context of a distinction between different levels of spatial