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In Things and Places, Zenon Pylyshyn argues that the process of incrementally
constructing perceptual representations, solving the binding problem (determining
which properties go together), and, more generally, grounding perceptual representations
in experience arise from the nonconceptual capacity to pick out and keep track of a
small number of sensory individuals. He proposes 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 keep track of
their enduring individuality despite radical changes in their properties-all without
the machinery of concepts, identity, and tenses. This mechanism, which he calls FINSTs
(for "Fingers of Instantiation"), is responsible for our capacity to individuate and
track several independently moving sensory objects-an ability that we exercise every
waking minute, and one that can be understood as fundamental to the way we see and
understand the world and to our sense of space.
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