Идеи и теоретические проблемы в картографии 80-х годов

Summary

This monograph critically surveys the major ideas and theoretical problems shaping cartography at the beginning of the 1980s, placing contemporary debates within the historical development of the discipline. It traces cartographic thought from Ptolemy’s conception of geography as a mathematical and graphic representation of the Earth, through the long integration of mapmaking with geography, to the organizational and intellectual separation of topographic and thematic mapping. The emergence of cartography as an autonomous science is examined with particular attention to Soviet scholarship, Western European and North American schools, higher cartographic education, and disputes over the discipline’s subject matter, methods, structure, and relationship to practice. The study evaluates competing attempts to define cartography as a formal science, a branch of information science, a semiotic system, or primarily a process of communication. While acknowledging the value of information theory, communication theory, and semiotics for explaining the transmission and interpretation of map information, the author criticizes approaches that reduce cartography to communication alone. He instead emphasizes the map as a spatial model of reality and cartography as a distinctive method of scientific cognition, integrating the production, analysis, and use of maps. From this standpoint, the monograph discusses cartographic modeling, comprehensive and systemic mapping, the structure of theoretical and applied cartography, and the discipline’s continuing connections with geography, geodesy, mathematics, psychology, linguistics, and other sciences. A second group of problems concerns the internal organization and functioning of cartographic representations. These include the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, logical, and linguistic properties of map language; psychophysical perception of symbols; formation of cartographic images; cognitive or mental maps; and the reliability of maps and information derived from them. Particular attention is given to generalization as a central theoretical and practical operation, including its systemic principles and prospects for algorithmization. The work also considers anamorphic representations and cartoids, the cartographic research method, mathematical-cartographic modeling, maps of fields and discrete phenomena, and statistical evaluation. Finally, it assesses how automation, computers, remote sensing, and space imagery transform both map production and map use while creating new theoretical requirements. Throughout, the author presents the development of cartographic science as a struggle among ideas rather than a linear accumulation of techniques, warning against terminological excess and abstract theorizing detached from practical mapping. The synthesis argues for a broad, integrated conception of cartography that preserves its geographical foundations while incorporating systems analysis and modern information technologies.