On Monday, I think it was, I was strolling along and thinking about something I'd read ages ago that professors are very silly sometimes, playing practical jokes and so on, because their constant acquisitiveness for knowledge makes them more childlike. At first I thought, well that's an interesting idea but in the complexity of the situation it's probably not broadly true.

But after I'd taken a few more paces, I reconsidered. If there is a value to the idea, how can we reconcile this with the fact that it might not be a true objective statement? So I thought about it in terms of being a mini-model: it's a model that we have about the world that is utterly mundane, just a kind of anecdotal thing, but it's an observation made in earnest. It's one of these little explanations that we come up with that make us happy sometimes, because it's a kind of connection that we made, a discovery. It's not that it's wrong, because you actually devised it; I mean that the statement itself might be wrong, specifically, but on the other hand it is true that you consider it to be an interesting model.

This is just the map-territory relation rehashed again, but from an interesting direction. The idea is that we accrue a kind of folk philosophy about the world that can be seen in terms of little sketched maps of a place that you're visiting on holiday. You know that other people have done work in making a decent map of the area: it's been satellite mapped and the Ordnance Survey have good 1:25,000 maps of the area. And yet every day that you go out walking, you make a map of the fences, some of the horses, the hedges, pylons, villages. And you get this map which, though it hasn't been authoritatively worked out and is actually kinda crappy and shouldn't be relied on for professional navigation and so on, it's a personally very interesting document.

And actually, these sorts of maps can be very useful. Ordnance Survey maps don't, as a rule, have horsies on 'em. When you have lots of these little maps, that you draw over time, you can trace your understanding of the landscape. The maps are, in themselves, a kind of territory; and in that understanding they are valid things.

One of the things that I like in reading people like Coleridge is that they make lots of these mini-models, and they do so with impunity. It's most strange in the really clear writers, like Orwell and his essays. Orwell comes up with lots of really clearly expressed things, and some of them you think "ooh, that's right!" and some of them you think "wow, he's so wrong". But once you've read the whole piece you feel enriched, and it's clear that he's a genius. Being brave to be clear in that kind of way is really hard as a writer; a great skill.