Spatial Entities

Abstract

Common-sense reasoning about space is, first and foremost, reasoning about things located in space. The fly is inside the glass; hence the glass is not inside the fly. The book is to the left of the glass; hence the glass is to the right of the book. Sometimes we may be talking about things going on in certain places: the concert took place in the garden; then dinner was served in the solarium. Even when we talk about “naked” (empty) regions of space — 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 are thinking that certain actions or events did or should take place in certain sites as opposed to others. The sofa should go right here; the aircraft crashed right there. Spatial reasoning, whether actual or hypothetical, is typically reasoning about spatial entities of some sort.