We must clearly distinguish between reality (the territory), and what we perceive to be reality (the map of the territory)! In our journey through life, we need something to guide us, to give us reassurance that we are on the right track. Modern science has done its best to take that reassurance away from us, telling us that there is no destination, no purpose, in life, and that in effect our lives are an accident of 'Nature'. Religion, too, has become equally unhelpful: it has become dogmatic, sectarian, and self-serving. We have lost the core, the real message, of religion, but we still need true spirituality. Indeed, we need a map to the Truth.

An original and wide-ranging study of the mappings used to impose meaning on the world, Mapping Reality argues that maps create rather than merely represent the ground on which they rest. Distinctions between map and territory questioned by some theorists of the postmodern have always been arbitrary. From the history of cartography to the mappings of culture, sexuality and nation, Geoff King draws on an extensive range of materials, including mappings imposed in the colonial settlement of America, the Cold War, Vietnam and the events since the collapse of the Soviet bloc. He argues for a deconstruction of the opposition between map and territory to allow dominant mappings to be challenged, their contours redrawn and new grids imposed.

Using the insights of evolutionary epistemology, the author develops a new naturalist realist methodology of science, and applies it to the conceptual, practical, and ethical problems of the social sciences.

With postmodernism and postructuralism sweeping the social sciences and humanities, a whole generation of students from disciplines as diverse as history, English literature, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology are learning that "truth" is bogus--a tired old liberal humanist fiction. Language is incapable of telling the truth, and science, nothing but a socially constructed discourse, functions to maintain the status quo. There is much to be said for this point of view, but ironically, relativists face precisely the same quandary, for if all claims to knowledge are equally valid, then de facto the knowledge claims of the most powerful are the ones disseminated and acted upon. This timely book offers a way out of the current realist/relativist impasse. Azevedo uses the insights of evolutionary epistemology to develop a naturalist realist methodology of science, the "mapping model of knowledge," and applies it to solving the conceptual, practical, and ethical problems faced by sociology as a discipline. The model is developed from the practice of the natural sciences, and comes with an easily applied and powerful heuristic based on mapping, filling the gap left by the downfall of positivist and empiricist methodologies. It shows the inescapably social nature of science, but argues that scientific theories can in fact be validated in perspective-neutral ways --not despite the social and interest-driven nature of science, but because of it.

It also considers the use of maps for military purposes, maps that have coded modern conceptions of health, disease and social character, and maps of the transparent human body and the transparent earth." "The final chapters of the book turn to the rapid pace of change in mapping technologies, the forms of visualization and representation that are now possible, and what the author refers to as 'the possibilities for post-representational cartographies'."--Jacket.

The study of 1st century CE Galilee has become an important subfield within the broader disciplines of Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity. In Mapping Galilee, John M. Vonder Bruegge examines how Galilee is portrayed, both in ancient writings and current scholarship, as a variously mapped space using insights from critical geography as an evaluative lens. Conventional approaches to Galilee treat it as a static backdrop for a deliberate and dynamic historical drama. By reasserting geography as a creative process rather than a passive description, Vonder Bruegge also reasserts ancient Galilee as an interpreted space—a series of conceptualized "maps"—laden with meaning, significance, and purpose for each individual author.

This book will be useful both to those new to spatial uncertainty assessment and to experienced practitioners.