(I present a little exercise in philosophy:)
Here is a question that could quite easily be posed by a scientist, and probably has been: “Does a snail have a map of its surroundings?”
For a philosopher the question has many hidden premises, which ultimately prove destructive to the sense of the question:
First, the question presupposes that there are objects that are definitively placed according to a universal map.
Second, the question assumes that these objects exist as they are defined.
Third, from the previous point we must also assume the presence of a universal perceiver or viewpoint that can disclose these a priori objects.
Fourth, it is not clear what map the term ‘surroundings’ could otherwise refer to - are we to assume an ethnocentric human view of the map that constitutes the ‘surroundings’, or are we to assume that the ‘surroundings map’ is made from the perspective of a universal perceiver? Neither option is of any use in answering the question.
Leaving aside the point that to speak of ‘surroundings’ we must already assume a map, it is quite clear that we are unable to pose the question ‘does a snail have a map of its surroundings’. The question should be formulated perhaps like this: “does the snail know how to get to its objects”.
