Map-territory relation
The map-territory relation--the relationship between symbol and object--is one of the lasting philosophical quandaries.
Gregory Bateson, in "Form, Substance and Difference," from Alcoholics Anonymous".
To paraphrase Bateson's argument, a culture that believes that common colds are transmitted by evil spirits, that those spirits fly out of you when you sneeze, can pass from one person to another when they are inhaled or when both handle the same objects, etc., could have just as effective a "map" for public health as one that substitutes microbes for spirits.
Another basic quandary is the problem of accuracy.
In "On Exactitude in Science", Jorge Luis Borges describes the tragic uselessness of the perfectly accurate, one-to-one map:
- In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild drew a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography saw the vast Map to be Useless and permitted it to decay and fray under the Sun and winters.
- In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; and in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Neil Gaiman retells the parable in reference to story-telling in American Gods:
- One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory.
Jorge Luis Borges, with this apocryphal quotation of Josiah Royce, describes a further conundrum of when the map is contained within the territory, you are led into Josiah Royce, in the first volume of his work simulation of ideas as encoded in electronic signals, as Baudrillard argues in
