Glimpses of Unsurveyable Maps

Abstract

That Ludwig Wittgenstein was interested in maps and map-making comes as no surprise. After all, he compares the form of a philosophical question to our common experience of disorientation – “ I don’t know my way about. ” (PI § 123) – and likens his Philosophical Investigations (PI) to an album containing sketches of a landscape which has been explored in a criss-cross manner. In this paper I present metaphors of perfect maps provided by Jorge Luis Borges, Lewis Carroll and Josiah Royce, and set these against remarks by Wittgenstein and Charles Sanders Peirce.