Science

Would it be accurate to say that the relationship between scientific theory and the material world is like the relationship between a map and the territory it represents?

Comments

This is an interesting analogy and it is one that some philosophers of science (e.g. Ronald Giere) have developed. It captures the idea that scientific theories represent the world by naming its objects and relations. But it is just an analogy, and like all analogies, the similarities only go so far.

The map analogy is good for illustrating how theories can be partial and not complete e.g. a map of the London Underground is partial, revealing topological relationships but not distances, and likewise classical thermodynamics reveals temperature/pressure/volume relationships but not magnetic forces.

The map analogy is less good for understanding the success of theories in quantum mechanics and particle physics, where theories are valued for their predictive power but not necessarily for their representativeness.

Maps are also more complicated than is assumed in the analogy: for example, different projections of 3D structures into 2D (e.g. the different projections of the earth's surface) may contradict each other and even misrepresent distances, angles, etc.

So--it's just an analogy, sometimes useful pedagogically, but not to be taken too literally.

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