Things and Places: How the Mind Connects With the World

In Things and Places, Zenon Pylyshyn argues that the process of incrementallyconstructing perceptual representations, solving the binding problem (determining which propertiesgo together), and, more generally, grounding perceptual representations in experience arise from thenonconceptual capacity to pick out and keep track of a small number of sensory individuals. Heproposes a mechanism in early vision that allows us to select a limited number of sensory objects,to reidentify each of them under certain conditions as the same individual seen before, and to keeptrack of their enduring individuality despite radical changes in their properties--all without themachinery of concepts, identity, and tenses. This mechanism, which he calls FINSTs (for"Fingers of Instantiation"), is responsible for our capacity to individuate and trackseveral independently moving sensory objects--an ability that we exercise every waking minute, andone that can be understood as fundamental to the way we see and understand the world and to oursense of space. Pylyshyn examines certain empirical phenomena of early vision in light of the FINSTmechanism, including tracking and attentional selection. He argues provocatively that the initialselection of perceptual individuals is our primary nonconceptual contact with the perceptual world(a contact that does not depend on prior encoding of any properties of the thing selected) and thendraws upon a wide range of empirical data to support a radical externalist theory of spatialrepresentation that grows out of his indexing theory.Zenon W. Pylyshyn is Board of GovernorsProfessor of Cognitive Science at Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. He is the author of Seeingand Visualizing: It's Not what You Think (2003) and Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundationfor Cognitive Science (1984), both published by The MIT Press, as well as over a hundred scientificpapers on perception, attention, and the computational theory of mind.

Hadas Steiner is Assistant Professor of Architectural History andTheory at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She completed herdissertation on the Archigram and images of indeterminacy at MIT.Her research continues to cross-pollinate the histories of architectureand technology with a focus on the postwar period andthe architectures of extreme conditions. Pending is a book on theevolution of the spatial network and the pictorial process throughwhich industrialized topography came to be understood throughthe management of movement.