Hayakawa’s dictum “…the map is NOT the territory it stands for.” (Language in Thought and Action, 1949) opens the question of what is the nature of its “NOT” being the territory it stands for?
That question has many aspects but the one for today is that the map “…stands for…” the territory. That implies that it points to or in some way represents the territory.
If a map points to a territory, can there be more than one map of the same territory?
Think of at least 2 examples of where there are different maps of physical territories.
How do those maps point to the territory in question?
How would you point to the maps in your example from another map?
Would that make the maps in your example into territories?
If not, why not?
In fact, the phrase “The map is not the territory” was coined by Alfred Korzybski (who Hayakawa cited as a big influence). It appears in his “Science and sanity” (1933), see http://books.google.de/books?id=KN5gvaDwrGcC (5. ed.). Another quote: “If we want … to understand anything at all, we must look for structure, relations, and, ultimately, multi-dimensional order…”. Topic maps are pretty close, I would think, representing knowledge as a structure with multiple relations and dimensions.
Comment by Saskia — August 16, 2010 @ 6:16 am
Saskia,
Thanks for the reference to Korzybski! I have been meaning to start reading his work on “General Semantics.”
Topic maps do have multiple relations and dimensions but I think both authoring and delivery of content may be enhanced by presenting less than all the information available for a particular subject.
I don’t know of any research on the topic but suspect that our various information devices and techniques do a lot of filtering now, whether we are aware of it or not.
Comment by Patrick Durusau — August 16, 2010 @ 7:38 am