Chapter 1 SPATIAL REASONING ANDONTOLOGY: PARTS, WHOLES, AND LOCATIONS

Spatial reasoning is no abstract business. It is, to a great extent, reason-ing about entities located in space, and such entities have spatial struc-ture. If the table is in the kitchen, then it follows that the table top is in the kitchen, and it follows because the top is part of the table. If the concert took place at the stadium, then it didn’t take place in the the-ater, for concerts are spatially continuous. Even when we reason about empty places, we typically do so with an eye to the anatomy of their po-tential tenants: space as such is perceptually remote and we can hardly understand its structure without imagining what could fill the void. This general feature of our spatial competence might suggest a deep metaphysical truth, to the effect that concrete entities such as objects and events are fundamentally prior to, and independent of, their spatial receptacles. It might even suggest that space itself is just a fiction, a picture of some kind: really there are only objects and events spatially related to one another in various ways. Such was, for instance, the gis