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Revision as of 22:37, 4 December 2006 by Fernandoleanes2005 (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)"On Exactitude in Science" or "On Rigor in Science" (the original Spanish-language title is "Del rigor en la ciencia") is a one-paragraph short story by Jorge Luis Borges, written in the form of a literary forgery, about the map/territory relation.
Plot
Template:Spoiler The story elaborates on a conceit in Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno Concluded: a fictional map that had "the scale of a mile to the mile." One of Carroll's characters notes some practical difficulties with this map and states that "we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."
The Borges story, credited falsely as a quotation from "Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658", imagines an empire where the science of cartography becomes so exact that only a map on the same scale as the empire itself will suffice. "Succeeding Generations... came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome... In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar..."
External links
The story is readily available in its entirety online:
- Translation by Andrew Hurley
- Another Translation by Norman Thomas de Giovanni. This is the translation quoted above; it is published in A Universal History of Infamy (ISBN 0-14-003959-7).
- Original Audio "On Rigor in Science"(voice of Jorge Luis Borges)