Map Thinking™ Vs. Logic

What is the difference between Map Thinking™ and Logic?

This little essay will help you build a map of the difference.

Logic seeks Truth .

Map Thinking™ seeks to understand relationships.

Logic concentrates on words and definitions of words in order to narrow the argument and keep to the subject.

Map Thinking™ concentrates on the linguistic implications of words in order to broaden the subject to where comprehension is achieved.

Logic is designed to produce answers.

Map Thinking™ is designed to produce questions.

A Logical Thinker places the greatest value on the answer that produces the greatest truth.

A Map Thinker™ places the greatest value on the usefulness or potential usefulness of concept, whether it be question, answer, or hypothesis.

Logic follows in the footsteps of Aristotle, Plato, and DesCartes. Logicians look for Answers.

Map Thinking™ follows in the footsteps of Socrates. Mapticians™ look for The 2 Q’s: Questions and Quests™

Let us take a minute out for a Map Legend™ — Or, if you will, a discussion of terms.

Map Thinking™ is what a Maptician™ does.

Mapology™ is the study of Map Thinking™.

A Mapologist™ is one who studies Mapology™.

The 2 Q’s: Questions and Quests™ may need a little more explanation.

In school we are taught that questions have answers. Those answers are written in the back of the book. He who has the “Right Answer” is the smartest in class and “Gets and A+”. This is Logical.

A Maptician™ like a good scientist, or a(n) historian, or a mathematician, considers questions that have easily findable answers to be simple, if not boring, questions. If you can find the answer using Google, Yahoo, or DuckDuckgo, the answer may be useful, but it is not really interesting.

A truly interesting Question starts a Quest.

People often believe that Einstein answered a lot of questions that Newton did not address.

He didn’t.

What he did was set up a theory that set of a plethora, or spate if you will, of questions that needed to be answered.

In other words he asked a HUGE question about the nature of the universe “What if we were wrong and this Theory of Relativity is right?”. Look how well, and differently Reality would fit together.

This question set scientists off on an enormous and difficult quest to prove or disprove his assertions.

Like many a gamer, Einstein asked the Question that started the Quest that, once solved, allowed Science to level up.

And move on to the next great question: Can Quantum Physics and The Theory of Relativity co-exist in the same universe?

Now that we have an insert, a legend, that gives us a general Map of The 2 Q’s™ let us get back to the main Map, or essay, if you wish. The difference between Logic and Mapology™.

Logicians only admit of one possible view. A Logician only recognizes that argument that is objectively, provably, unarguably, true. Once this truth is established no other Point of View is allowed.

Mapticians™ look at every possible Point of View of which they are aware. This helps them to achieve understanding of the relationships involved. They then attempt to determine, by search or by guess, what the effect of each POV might be. They eliminate those which are destructive to their goal. They eliminate those that are useless. They sort through those that are left and choose the one, one’s, or combination, that suit the Maptician’s™ purpose.

The Maptician™ philosophically accepts the scientific principle that the observer, by their very existence, effects whatever is being observed.

This is not a new idea.

A philosopher named Epictetus who died only 135 years after Christ worte, “People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of things.”

People like Eckhart Tolle and Maxwell Maltz take this simple observation and create self help systems based on the concept, “You can control your life, your happiness, etc, by taking control of how you view events in your life.”

And they are right.

But a Maptician™ takes this observation and carries it a step further.

A Maptician™ realizes that in order to fully understand any event they must also understand the POV’s of those who both observe and are effected by the event.

This is often best achieved by looking at the stories of those involved.

Logic isolates an event or a thought and deals only with what has been isolated.

Mapology™ insists that what came before, and what happened or is likely to happen after, is just as important to understanding the event as the event itself.

Plato believed we only see the shadows of real things.

A Maptician™ does not see things or their shadows. A Maptician™ sees the interrelationships between things and the intrarelationships of things.

Thus logically either a rose is a rose or it is not a rose. If it is a rose then it is either a red rose or it is not a red rose. If we move to Bertrand Russell style Logic then either a thing belongs to the class of things we call roses or it belongs to another class of things we call something else.

A Maptician™ sees the interrelationship of the rose to the soil and the sunlight and the bee. Further the Maptician™ recognizes the differing points of view of the bee, the gardener, and the dog peeing on the rosebush.

The Maptician™ further sees the intrarelationships that cause the rose to extract nutrients from the soil and sunlight, and allows it to produce red flowers and green leaves.

And while the Maptician™ recognizes that the rose has features that distinguish it in the human mind from other plants it still has many more things in common with other plants than it has things that differ.

This pretty much lines up the differences between Logic and Mapology™.

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