“To make maps that work, we must depict categories using methods that match the structures of human mental categorization.”

— Alan MacEachren

Source: How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995), p. 152. As cited in: V.P. Filippakopoulou et al. (2002)

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Alan MacEachren 23

American geographer 1952

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

Source: Research challenges in geovisualization (2001), p. 6-7

“Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p.15

“Without categorization, maps would not be possible.”

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

Source: How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995), p. 151. As cited in: V.P. Filippakopoulou et al. (2002) " Exploring Children’s Ability to Categorize and Symbolize http://users.ntua.gr/bnakos/Data/Section%205-6/Pub_5-6-37.pdf". In: Cartografia para Escolares no Brazil. Belo Horizonte

“The map is not the territory … The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map…”

Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) Polish scientist and philosopher

Edition:Institute of General Semantics, 1995, p. 58.
Science and Sanity (1933)

“We must be careful, however, not to let the process of acquiring new ideas interfere with the detailed knowledge that our vehicle has assiduously collected and carefully stored in many associative connections during its lifetime. We know that this may happen in humans who are overly dedicated to the development of ideas. They tend to connect many individual cases into general categories ad then use the categories as if they were things, losing the potential for categorizing in other ways by remembering each instance.”

Valentino Braitenberg (1926–2011) Italian-Austrian neuroscientist

Source: Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (1984), p. 52 as cited in: Vehicles – Valentino Braitenberg, 1984 http://problemboard.com/bio/?p=5 at problemboard.com, 2013

“To say categorically, 'There is no God,' is to make an absolute statement. For the statement to be true, I must know for certain that there is no God in the entire universe. No human being has all knowledge. Therefore, none of us is able to truthfully make this assertion.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

God doesn't believe in atheists (2002)

“We now understand that every mental state and every mental disorder is a disorder of brain function. Treatments work by altering the structure and function of the brain.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)

“The three basic mechanisms of averaging, feedback and division of labor give us a first idea of a how a CMM [Collective Mental Map] can be developed in the most efficient way, that is, how a given number of individuals can achieve a maximum of collective problem-solving competence. A collective mental map is developed basically by superposing a number of individual mental maps. There must be sufficient diversity among these individual maps to cover an as large as possible domain, yet sufficient redundancy so that the overlap between maps is large enough to make the resulting graph fully connected, and so that each preference in the map is the superposition of a number of individual preferences that is large enough to cancel out individual fluctuations. The best way to quickly expand and improve the map and fill in gaps is to use a positive feedback that encourages individuals to use high preference paths discovered by others, yet is not so strong that it discourages the exploration of new paths.”

Francis Heylighen (1960) Belgian cyberneticist

Source: Collective Intelligence and its Implementation on the Web (1999), p.265

“But because of the way in which depictions represent, there is a correspondence between parts and spatial relations of the representation and those of the object; this structural mapping, which confers a type of resemblance, underlies the way images convey specific content. In this respect images are like pictures. Unlike words and symbols, depictions are not arbitrarily paired with what they represent.”

Stephen Kosslyn (1948) American psychologist

Stephen M. Kosslyn, ‎William L. Thompson, ‎Giorgio Ganis (2006), The Case for Mental Imagery. p. 44; Cited in: Michael R. W. Dawson (2013). Mind, Body, World: Foundations of Cognitive Science. p. 108

“…I offended some of you by saying you had been brainwashed. This is not an insult; it's a simple statement of fact. When any infant is born and socialized in a society, even if he is to become a very mature individual, he has been brainwashed. …given a structure for categorizing his experience and a system of values applied to the structure of categories.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

“To make maps that work, we must depict categories using methods that match the structures of human mental categorization.”

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