2025.03.7 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Roberto Casati, The Cognitive Life of Maps, MIT Press, 2024, 256pp., $45.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780262547086.
Reviewed by Ben Blumson, National University of Singapore
In The Cognitive Life of Maps, Roberto Casati reflects on how maps, as well as many other superficially different but fundamentally similar kinds of representation, such as clocks and musical notation, aid us in navigation and other cognitive tasks. Chapter 1 begins by describing how using a map aids navigation by offloading the difficult task of visualising the terrain to an external tool. Casati also notes an analogy between this use of maps and the famous example of Otto’s notebook discussed in the literature on the extended mind (Clark and Chalmers 1998), but he sensibly refrains from taking up the question of whether maps used in this way should be considered part of the mind, and instead proposes labelling the phenomena neutrally as “equipped-cognition”. The…
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