Description
The “mapness of maps”—how maps live in interaction with their users, and what this tells us about what they are and how they work.
In a sense, maps are temporarily alive for those who design, draw, and use them. They have, for the moment, a cognitive life. To grapple with what this means—to ask how maps can be alive, and what kind of life they have—is to explore the core question of what maps are. And this is what Roberto Casati does in The Cognitive Life of Maps, in the process assembling the conceptual tools for understanding why maps have the power they have, why they are so widely used, and how we use (and misuse) them.
Drawing on insights from cognitive science and philosophy of mind, Casati considers the main claims around what maps are and how they work—their specific syntax, peculiar semantics, and pragmatics. He proposes a series of steps that can lead to a precise theory of maps, one that reveals what maps have in common with diagrams, pictures, and texts, and what makes them different. This minimal theory of maps helps us to see maps nested in many cognitive artifacts—clock faces, musical notation, writing, calendars, and numerical series, for instance. It also allows us to tackle the issue of the territorialization of maps—to show how maps can be used to draw specific spatial inferences about territories. From the mechanics of maps used for navigation to the differences and similarities between maps and pictures and models, Casati's ambitious work is a cognitive map in its own right, charting the way to a new understanding of what maps mean.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
An Overview 1
1 A Toolbox and the Mechanics 11
2 The Central Features of Maps: Systematicity, Hypergenerativity 41
3 Pictures and Maps, Pictures as Maps, and Some Other Maps 83
4 Maps, Navigation, and Situation: Red Dots, Green Dots 109
5 Maps and Models 133
6 Clockfaces 151
7 Music Notation as Map 167
8 Organizers as Maps 181
9 Concluding Remarks: The Cognitivie Life of Maps 201
Appendix: Maps in the Brain? 213
Notes 217
References 225
Index 239
