"we might have confused in the past two entirely different meanings of the word
“correspondence”: the first seems to rely on a resemblance between two elements
(signs on the map and territory, or, more philosophically words and worlds); while
the second emphasizes the establishment of some relevance that allows a navigator to
align several successive sign posts along a trajectory. While the first meaning implies what
William James called a salto mortale between two, and only two, end points through a
huge gap, the second defines what James called a deambulation between many
successive stepping stones in order to achieve the miracle of reference by making
sure that there are as little gap as possible between two successive links (James,
1907). Both are depending on correspondence, but one engages the mapping
impulse into an impasse (ironically recorded by Borges’ fable: is the map similar to
the territory?) while the other allows to move away from it and deploy the whole
chain of production that has always been associated with map making —as we
recognized above.
To make clear the difference between the two meanings, we are going to call
the first one the mimetic interpretation, and the second the navigational
interpretation of maps."
Bruno Latour et al.