Casati, Roberto & Varzi, Achille C. - Parts and Places: The Structures of Spatial Representation

Thinking about space is, first and foremost, thinking about spatial things. The book is on the table; hence the table is under the book. The cake is in the tin and the tin is in the kitchen; hence the cake is in the kitchen. Sometimes we talk about things going on in certain places: the concert took place in the garden; the game was played at Yankee Stadium. Even when we talk about empty places—spatial regions that are not occupied by any macroscopic object and where nothing noticeable seems to be going on—we typically do so because we are planning to move things around or because we think that certain events did or could occur in certain places as opposed to others. The sofa should go right here; the accident happened right there. Spatial thinking, whether actual or hypothetical, is typically thinking about spatial entities of some sort.