Hi nj, Regarding the concepts map, territory and first access (I assume that is what you intended) I believe that my understanding of Carmens and Johns use of them is still improvable. Perhaps especially regarding FA - John or Carmen wrote a reply in an earlier thread which cleared some things up for me - however I am still not clear about the proper use of FA - obviously the pedagogical intent (sic) behind the term must be to point us towards our first access of our experiences of the world, the rawest most unfiltered experiences. But what does this mean? Are we talking about the rawest experience possible given a human neurology - a set of experiences achieved seldom by ordinary specimens. It may also refer to the least transformed set of data we access at any given point in time. However at other times it appears to me as if John and Carmen use FA to refer to nonlinguistically transformed experience - and this set obviously need not be our rawest most unfiltered experience of the world. For me the transderivational search for the exact meaning of the term FA has been quite rewarding. Do I believe in those concepts? Frankly I do not know. I use them. Embarrassed I am to admit that you have caught me without a copy of Structure of Magic in my bookcase. :-/ Regarding the relationship between beliefs and dialogical facts, I think that the dialogical facts emerge from the interplay of different beliefs, so I agree that a deeper understanding of any of them will deepen the understanding of the other. /Thomas P.S. The title of this thread is obviously wrong. I intended to write "the territory is the map" - the map is not the territory, but in human affairs the territory often consists of the maps involved.