In another side-quest from his current work in progress, Matthew Edney goes down a deep rabbit hole trying to work out a specific point related to Alfred Korzybski’s famous adage that “the map is not the territory”—a metaphor for the description not being the thing described. The precise quote is as follows:
Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. If the map could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, the map of the map; the map of the map, of the map; and so on, endlessly, a fact first noticed by Royce.1
Insofar as I follow Edney’s line of argument,2 it’s the question of self-reflexivity—the idea that any ideal map of the territory would include itself, as part of the territory being mapped, on the map, with infinite regressions—that he is trying to grapple with, along with the question of what Korzybski and his general semantics successors were doing when they were talking about the “ideally correct map”—a subject about which Edney has had something to say.