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While pre-objects are always referentially anchored, but cannot be accessed from another context, objects in the sense we usually associate with the expression ‘object’ are the constituting parts of many contexts. They are essentially viewed as instances of sortal concepts: perceptible, countable entities that are persistent over time even if they are not perceived, and that may even change their appearance dramatically during their lifetime (e.g., catapillar to butterfly). These are apparently also the kind of objects depicted in the most central cases of the concept »image« – from the animals of prehistorical cave paintings to ZEUXIS’ apples and grapes, from the author’s passport

photograph to JUAN GRIS’ cubistic portrait of PICASSO (Fig. 6). In his Elements of

Arithmetics [FREGE 1884, §54], FREGE distinguished this kind of concepts that “separate

clearly and do not allow arbitrary divisions.” A chair, by means of being a chair, clearly can be separated as an individual from any other chair; and the parts of that chair are not also chairs again. Objects falling under concepts like »water« or »red« do not have these attributes: two red objects are not distinguishable by means of their being red alone. And every part of a red surface is also red. Furthermore, sortal concepts allow us for pursuing an individual object in its singular temporal development across the contexts.

How can we be sure that something we saw this morning, e.g., a very bright star near the rising sun (let’s call it ‘the morning star’), and something we see right now in the evening, e.g., another bright star near the west horizon (correspondingly called ‘the evening star’), are the same object? Or: what is actually the communicative function of an assertion stating the identity of the morning star and the evening star? It is in fact the

attribute of »planet« to be a sortal concept that renders an identification phrase like ‘the morning star is the same as the evening star’ to a meaningful utterance although the perceptual contexts of the two nominations are incompatible: the assertion has to be understood as ‘they are both the same planet’ (cf. Fig.s 23 & 24). That the referent of ‘the morning star’, which can merely be perceived in the morning, and the referent of ‘the evening star’, which correspondingly can be perceived only in the evening, are in fact identical, this proposition cannot be verified but by means of the criterion of spatio- temporal individuation given with the concept »planet«. In contrast to the planet Venus, i.e., the whole spatio-temporal extension of that object from its birth to its present existence (and beyond), which is only abstractly given and forms in FREGE’s terms the

common “Bedeutung” (reference) of the nominators ‘the evening star’ and ‘the morning star’, the immediate sensations of the Venus at either the early morning or the late evening, are the “Gegebenheitsweisen” – ways in which the Venus is presented to us, and also the only concrete way for it to be given [FREGE 1892]. Obviously, these ‘ways

of being given’ are closely related to pre-objects, their associated sensory-motor routines, and the referential anchoring basing any empirical observation.

Similarly, the referent of ‘this house’ while uttered from one particular point of view, and of ‘this house’ while uttered from a very different point of view may be the same house. In this case, the two nominators, which are in fact linguistically the same with the exception of their perceptual contexts, refer to two different manners of presentation of the same individual house meant – or, from the prespective of pre-object creatures, to two unrelated pre-objects.

In analytic philosophy, sortal concepts are conceived of as a systematic co-ordination between (a) configurational ‘Gestalt’ entities (of a ‘geometrical field of concepts’), and (b) objects involved in part-whole relations that allow us to assign functions to those ob- jects (of a ‘functional field’) (cf. Fig. 25; [VIEU 1991]). The field of objects with the

functional part-whole relations, abstract as it is, does not describe or restrict in any manner the geometrical relations between an object and its parts. It only allows us to state that there are such parts, and that without this or that part, the whole object would be something different. The schema of sortal objects leads to entities that have not only parts, but also a geometrical shape and a location; and additionally, all the parts also have shapes and locations – the whole object is a configuration of the shapes of its parts.

Note that the pre-objects or views at different “time slices” form another kind of parts of the whole sortal object.

The combination of the two fields of concepts has an interesting effect on the ability to identify corresponding instances: similar to two red ob- jects, which are not distinguishable by their being red alone, the functional parts of a car, for exam- ple, do not distinguish one car clearly from an- other one of the same type, since they both have the same functional structure, and are therefore functionally indistinguishable. Only the different geometrical components of two instances of »car«, their different histories, allow us to distin- guish both. It is, on the other hand, not the mere geometric Gestalt that makes something a car, but the functional restrictions between its parts. Fur- thermore, it is not possible to distinguish purely by geometrical features an object from its mate- rial, e.g., a ring and the gold making it up: in many contexts, these two different objects, which stand in a particular functional relation, have the same Gestalt properties and are in- volved in the very same geometric relations.

We remember: a pre-object is usually perceived by means of just one of the sensors of the reflex arcs combined in the corresponding detector. In analogy, a sortal object is perceived by means of just one detector: of all the pre-objects covered by the concept the one pre-object that is possible in the actual situation. We cannot perceive an instance of a sortal object in its whole spatio-temporal extension but only what is given in the one, present situational context. But whereas the concept »pre-object« does not include an option of accessing the constituting reflexes as opposed to the whole pre-object, it is a central feature of sortal concepts that the corresponding “manners of being given” can be made explicit: the current perception (as of a pre-object) in opposition to the individ- ual with its complete history.23 _{The ability to separate the different views is indeed}

equivalent with the ability to access other contexts (i.e., holding the non-current views of a sortal object). The integration of a multitude of contextual views also subsumes the co-relation of the distinct perspectives of the different interlocutors in one situation.24

The field of concepts of geometric Gestalts is of particular interest for us. The in- stances in this field correspond approximately to visual pre-objects. They are immedi- ately observable. But they do not have the persistent identity of sortal objects and disap- pear if the beholder stops keeping them in his/her focus of attention. In contrast to mere pre-objects, they form however an incompatibility area of locations – a Euclidean co- ordinate system of potential, that is, not actually realized, situational contexts: space per se. Because that is after all what empty space is to be conceived of: as an infinite poten-

23

– in opposition also to the abstract functional part-whole constituents, of course. 24

For MEAD, the anticipation of the perspective of another one forms the crucial step for pre-object crea-

tures to reach “significant gestures”, i.e., context-independent communication by using signs with a common meaning, cf. Section 3.5.3.

Figure 25: Sketch on Sortal Object Constitution

tial of situational contexts together with a structure that allows us to reach one situation from another one.25

True individuality and true generality depend on the ability to consider the negative as such, the lack of something, the absence, the void. Homogenous intuition of space and time, hollow space and hollow time with empty places “needing” to be filled with constant elements are thus necessarily coextensive with true objective perception of things and true ideative abstraction.

[PLESSNER1928, Sect. 6.5]

As a consequence, if told the assertion that an object is at place ABC we do not – as usually with assertions – interpret the nomination (which object) and check whether the distinction mentioned by the predication holds or not (is at ABC), but go looking at ABC and then check whether the object is there (verification inversion).