Quad-Quote: The Map Is Not The Territory
“The map is not the territory.”
“The next Monday, when the fathers were all back at work, we kids were playing in a field. One kid says to me, ‘See that bird? What kind of bird is that?’ I said, ‘I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.’ He says, ‘It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you anything!’ But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: ‘See that bird?’ he says. ‘It’s a Spencer’s warbler.’ I knew he didn’t know the real name. ‘Well, in Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it’s a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it’s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it’s a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing — that’s what counts.’ I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
“I am interested now as a mother myself in how we introduce our children to the world. What world are you introducing them to? My father introduced me to a world that came pre-interconnected, or un-separated…and part of that was, from the start, recognition of my place as observer. The thing is not the thing — you have to think about who is observing the thing. So, right from the very beginning there was this focus on being careful about what we presume ‘is.’ So, part of that had to do with recognizing how things are identified by names and where do those names come from and is the thing ‘the thing named’ or is it the name? While that might sound like its complex material to be fooling around with a five or six year old, I never questioned it, it seemed perfectly normal to me. I don’t think that I was an extraordinarily precocious child, I just lived in a house in which that is what we did. And this question of the map and territory was a constant reminder to not slip into sloppy thinking. There are some households where if you leave the lights on you get in trouble or if you leave your underpants on the bathroom floor you get in trouble, but in our household sloppy thinking and mistaking map for territory was the sort of thing you got in trouble for.”
“The menu is not the meal.”
