From: scerir (scerir@libero.it)
Date: Mon Dec 17 2001 - 10:06:50 MST
> From: Amara Graps
> P.S. That old adage: "The map is not the territory" might apply here.
Alfred Korzybski ["General Semantics, Psychiatry, Psycotherapy
and Preventio"; America Journal of Psychiatry; 98, (1941), 203-214]
said that (1) a map is not the territory, (2) a map does not represent all
of a territory, (3) a map is self-reflexive in the sense that an 'ideal' map
would include a map of the map, etc., indefinitely.
http://www.gestalt.org/alfred.htm
http://www.philosphere.com/Korzybski.html
Statement ((2) is wrong. A map which represent all of a
territory is a "contraction" but not a "contradiction".
Stephan Banach ["Sur les Operations dans les Ensembles Abstraits
et leur Applications aux Equations Integrales"; Fundamenta Mathematicae;
3, (1922), 7-33] showed that in every good map ("contraction") a single,
unique point of the territory must be represented on the map.
Statement (3) was stolen from Josiah Royce ["The World and the Individual",
New York: MacMillan & Co., Ltd., 1899].
J. A. Suarez Miranda [that is to say... J.L. Borges (*)] wrote the interesting
"Travels of Praiseworthy Men" (1658) in which:
"...In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection
that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City,
and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of
Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so
the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was
of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point
for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding
Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome,
and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of
Sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the
Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar;
in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography."
(*) "Of Exactitude in Science"
The piece was written by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares.
English translation quoted from J. L. Borges, "A Universal History of Infamy",
Penguin Books, London, 1975.
And Italo Calvino was a good second. From 'Invisible Cities' (1972)
"VI, Cities and the sky."
"In Eudossia, that extends up and low, with meandering alleys, steps, narrow
lanes, hovels, a carpet is kept in which you can contemplate the real shape
of the city. At first nothing seems to resemble less Eudossia than the
design of the carpet, ordered in symmetrical figures that repeat their
patterns along straight and circular lines, woven of needleful of dazzling
colors, which alternating wefts you can follow all along the warp. But if
you stop to observe it with attention, you perceive that to every place of
the carpet corresponds a place of the city and that all the things contained
in the city are comprised in the design, arranged according to their true
relationships, which escape to your eye distracted from the coming and going
from the swarming from the awful crush. All the confusion in Eudossia, the
bray of the mules, the spots of lamp-black, the smell of fish, is what
appear in the partial perspective that you pick; but the carpet proves that
there is a point from which the city shows its true proportions, the
geometric outline implicit in its every minimal detail.
Getting lost in Eudossia is easy: but when you concentrates staring the
carpet you recognize the road that you were looking for in a crimson or
indigo or amaranth thread that through a long round lets you enter in a
purple fence that is your true point of arrival. Every inhabitant of
Eudossia confronts to the immovable order of the carpet his own image of the
city, an anguish, and everyone can find hidden between the arabesques an
answer, the story of his life, the twists of his destiny.
An oracle was consultated about the mysterious relationship between two such
different objects as the carpet and the city. One of the two objects, - it
was the response, - has the shape that the gods gave to the starry sky and
to the orbits around which the worlds spin; the other one is an approximate
glare, like every human work.
The augurs since so long were sure that the harmonic design of the carpet
was of divine nature; in this sense the oracle was interpreted, without
giving place to controversies. But in the same way you can draw the opposite
conclusion: that the real map of the universe is the city of Eudossia as it
is, a spot that spreads without shape, with zigzag roads, houses collapsing
above one another in the dust, fires, cries in the dark."
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