 The maps view makes nice sense of the fact that when a person changes one belief, a multitude of other beliefs seem also to change simultaneously and effortlessly: If you shift a mountain farther north on a map, for example, you immediately and automatically change many other aspects of the representational system (the distance between the mountain and the north coast, the direction one must hike to go from the mountain to the oasis, etc.). In contrast, if you change the linguistic representation “the mountain peak is 15 km north of the river” to “the mountain peak is 20 km north of the river”, no other representation necessarily changes: It takes a certain amount of inferential work to ramify the consequences through the rest of the system. Since it doesn’t seem like we’re constantly making such a plethora of inferences, the maps view might have an advantage here. On the other hand, perhaps just because the linguistic view requires inference for what appears to happen automatically on the maps view, the linguistic view can more easily account for failures of rationality, in which not all the necessary changes are made and the subject ends up with an inconsistent view. Indeed generally speaking it’s unclear how the map view can accommodate inconsistent beliefs unless one allows a proliferation of maps, with the complications that ensue (like redundancy and mechanisms for relating the maps). Certain sorts of indeterminacy may also be more difficult to accommodate in map-like than in language-like structures. A linguistic representation like “there are some lakes east of the mountain” can leave completely unspecified how many lakes, of what shape, and where; a map does not, it seems, as easily do this. One further point of apparent difference between the two views will be discussed in §2.2 below. Generally speaking, one might worry that the maps view overgenerates and overspecifies beliefs, while the linguistic view undergenerates and underspecifies them.