“How many legs does a dog have, if you call a tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”
—Abraham Lincoln
This is the sort of quip that gives the speaker a cheap thrill of superiority, but underneath it is just a cheap trick.
In this case, the trick is that Lincoln (or whoever its real author is) has confused de dicto and de re. That is, he confuses assertions that are to be understood inside vs outside a quote-like context; in this case, in the context of the provision that we shall call a dog’s tail a leg. He uses that to commit the fallacy of ambiguity. There is an undistributed middle term lurking in there, a modal operator that appears twice and needs to have the same semantics both times, and doesn’t.
So I don’t think this particular quote is a good illustration of “the map is not the territory”. There’s nothing about general semantics that forbids agreeing on or using some labelling scheme, even a variant labelling. The idea of GS is “the map is not the territory”, not “use no maps” or “use no non-standard maps”.
This is the sort of quip that gives the speaker a cheap thrill of superiority, but underneath it is just a cheap trick.
In this case, the trick is that Lincoln (or whoever its real author is) has confused de dicto and de re. That is, he confuses assertions that are to be understood inside vs outside a quote-like context; in this case, in the context of the provision that we shall call a dog’s tail a leg. He uses that to commit the fallacy of ambiguity. There is an undistributed middle term lurking in there, a modal operator that appears twice and needs to have the same semantics both times, and doesn’t.
So I don’t think this particular quote is a good illustration of “the map is not the territory”. There’s nothing about general semantics that forbids agreeing on or using some labelling scheme, even a variant labelling. The idea of GS is “the map is not the territory”, not “use no maps” or “use no non-standard maps”.