| Summary: | There is a large body of literature investigating spatial disorientation —ranging from geography to neuroscience—, but there is no unified understanding of the phenomenon. In response to this heterogeneity, the present doctoral thesis advances a unified theory of spatial disorientation.Disorientation is, at heart, a subjective phenomenon, and it is by devoting proper attention to its subjective aspects that we can reach the sought-for integrative account. Qualitative empirical research —such as a corpus of subjective reports collected through Qualtrics and ethnographic fieldwork with Evenki indigenous hunters in arctic Siberia— guides both the conceptual analysis and the phenomenological investigation in this thesis. The phenomenological analysis of disorientation reveals the link between our sense of space and our sense of possibility. During our everyday orientation, there is an ongoing integration of indexical and non-indexical spatial representations of our environment. The result is that in our standard experience of a well-known environment there is always an out-of-sight spatial configuration looming beyond the horizon of our experience and framing that horizon. When we are disoriented, we lose this sense of where our out-of-sight surroundings are located with respect to our present position. Most often, during disorientation we find ourselves in a space that is both impoverished and oppressive. We lose not only our sense of the structure of our environment, but also of our possibilities within that environment. This commonly results in confusion, anxiety and helplessness. The conceptual and phenomenological analysis in this monograph help advance its central thesis, which is that the best way to characterize disorientation is as a metacognitive feeling. Here, the way to understand metacognitive feelings (like the feeling of knowing or the feeling of familiarity) is as affective experiences concerning the subject’s own mental states, processes or capacities. In our case, a cognitive subsystem evaluates ...
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