Reality as representation: the semiotics of cartography and the generation of meaning

This book takes maps to be a demonstration of how humankind's intellectual appropriation of reality aims to offer a linguistic construction of the world, with the body of names and signs within a map forming the world of sense exeprience into ordered knowledge. This innovative study looks at the semiotics of cartography in temrs of semantics, syntax and pragmatics, and thus illustrates how a map communicates. The empirical studies that accompany the theoretical discussion range from Rainassance maps to Euclidean cartography, bringing out the specific nature of this means of communication and its special feature of "self-representation".