The map–territory relation is the relationship between an object and a representation of that object, as in the relation between a geographical territory and a map of it. Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski remarked that "the map is not the territory" and that "the word is not the thing", encapsulating his view that an
abstraction
Abstraction in its main sense is a conceptual process wherein general rules and concepts are derived from the usage and classification of specific examples, literal ("real" or " concrete") signifiers, first principles, or other methods.
"An a ...
derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself. Korzybski held that many people do confuse maps with territories, that is, confuse conceptual models of reality with reality itself. These ideas are crucial to general semantics, a system Korzybski originated.
The relationship has also been expressed in other terms, such as "the model is not the data", " all models are wrong", and Alan Watts' "The menu is not the meal." The concept is thus quite relevant throughout
ontology
In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality.
Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities ...
and applied ontology regardless of any connection to general semantics per se (or absence thereof). Its avatars are thus encountered in
semantics
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and compu ...
logistics
Logistics is generally the detailed organization and implementation of a complex operation. In a general business sense, logistics manages the flow of goods between the point of origin and the point of consumption to meet the requirements of ...
semiotics
Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes (semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, ...
, and many other applications.
A frequent coda to " all models are wrong" is that "all models are wrong (but some are useful)," which emphasizes the proper framing of recognizing map–territory differences—that is, how and why they are important, what to do about them, and how to live with them properly. The point is not that all maps are useless; rather, the point is simply to maintain
critical thinking
Critical thinking is the analysis of available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments to form a judgement. The subject is complex; several different definitions exist, which generally include the rational, skeptical, and unbiased an ...
about the discrepancies: whether or not they are either negligible or significant in each context, how to reduce them (thus
iterating
ITerating was a Wiki-based software guide, where users could find, compare and give reviews to software products. As of January 2021 the domain is listed as being for sale and the website no longer on-line. Founded in October 2005, and based in N ...
a map, or any other model, to become a better version of itself), and so on.
"A map is not the territory"
The expression first appeared in print in "A Non-Aristotelian System and Its Necessity for Rigour in Mathematics and Physics", a paper that Alfred Korzybski gave at a meeting of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsi ...
Louisiana
Louisiana , group=pronunciation (French: ''La Louisiane'') is a U.S. state, state in the Deep South and South Central United States, South Central regions of the United States. It is the List of U.S. states and territories by area, 20th-smal ...
on December 28, 1931. The paper was reprinted in ''Science and Sanity'', 1933, pp. 747–761. In this book, Korzybski acknowledges his debt to mathematician Eric Temple Bell, whose epigram "the map is not the thing mapped" was published in ''Numerology''.
The Belgian
surrealist
Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to ...
artist
René Magritte
René François Ghislain Magritte (; 21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist known for his depictions of familiar objects in unfamiliar, unexpected contexts, which often provoked questions about the nature and bounda ...
illustrated the concept of "perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves" in a number of paintings including a famous work entitled '' The Treachery of Images'', which consists of a drawing of a pipe with the caption, ''Ceci n'est pas une pipe'' ("This is not a pipe").
In '' Understanding Media'',
Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media studies, media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridg ...
expanded this argument to electronic media with his introduction of the phrase " The Medium is the Message" (and later in the book titled ''The Medium is the Massage''.) media representations, especially on screens, are abstractions, or virtual "extensions" of what our sensory channels, bodies, thinking and feeling do for us in real life.
This concept occurs in the discussion of exoteric and esoteric
religion
Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatural ...
s. Exoteric concepts are concepts which can be fully conveyed using descriptors and
language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...
Esoteric
Western esotericism, also known as esotericism, esoterism, and sometimes the Western mystery tradition, is a term scholars use to categorise a wide range of loosely related ideas and movements that developed within Western society. These ideas a ...
concepts are concepts which cannot be fully conveyed except by direct experience. For example, a person who has never tasted an
apple
An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus '' Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ances ...
will never fully understand through language what the taste of an apple is. Only through direct experience (eating an apple) that experience can be fully understood.
Lewis Carroll, in ''
Sylvie and Bruno Concluded
Sylvie may refer to:
* Sylvie (novel), ''Sylvie'' (novel), an 1853 novel by Gérard de Nerval
* Sylvie (actress) (1883–1970), French actress
* Sylvie (band), a Canadian rock band from Regina, active in the 2000s
* Sylvie (album), ''Sylvie'' (alb ...
'' (1893), made the point humorously with his description of a fictional map that had "the scale of a mile to the mile". A character notes some practical difficulties with such a map and states that "we now use the
country
A country is a distinct part of the world, such as a state, nation, or other political entity. It may be a sovereign state or make up one part of a larger state. For example, the country of Japan is an independent, sovereign state, whil ...
itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (; ; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, as well as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known b ...
's one-paragraph short story " On Exactitude in Science" (1946) describes a map that has the same scale as its territory.
Laura Riding, in her poem ''The Map of Places'' (1927), deals with this relation: "The map of places passes. The reality of paper tears."
The economist Joan Robinson (1962): "A model which took account of all the variegation of reality would be of no more use than a map at the scale of one to one."
Korzybski's argument about the map and the territory also influenced the Belgian
surrealist
Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to ...
writer of comics Jan Bucquoy for a storyline in his comic ''Labyrinthe'': a map can never guarantee that one will find the way out, because the accumulation of events can change the way one looks at reality.
Author
Robert M. Pirsig
Robert Maynard Pirsig (; September 6, 1928 – April 24, 2017) was an American writer and philosopher. He was the author of the philosophical novels ''Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An ...
uses the idea both theoretically and literally in his book '' Lila'' when the main character/author becomes temporarily lost due to an over reliance on a map, rather than the territory that the map describes.
In 2010, French author Michel Houellebecq published his novel, ''La carte et le territoire'', translated into English as ''
The Map and the Territory
''The Map and the Territory'' (french: La carte et le territoire, ) is a novel by French author Michel Houellebecq. The narrative revolves around a successful artist, and involves a fictional murder of Houellebecq. It was published on 4 Septembe ...
''. The title was a reference to Alfred Korzybski's
aphorism
An aphorism (from Greek ἀφορισμός: ''aphorismos'', denoting 'delimitation', 'distinction', and 'definition') is a concise, terse, laconic, or memorable expression of a general truth or principle. Aphorisms are often handed down by t ...
. The novel was awarded the French literary prize, the
Prix Goncourt
The Prix Goncourt (french: Le prix Goncourt, , ''The Goncourt Prize'') is a prize in French literature, given by the académie Goncourt to the author of "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year". The prize carries a symbolic reward o ...
.
The map-territory distinction is emphasized by
Robert Anton Wilson
Robert Anton Wilson (born Robert Edward Wilson; January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007) was an American author, futurist, psychologist, and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized within Discordianism as an Episkopos, pope and saint, Wilso ...
James A. Lindsay
James Stephen Lindsay (born June 8, 1979), known professionally as James A. Lindsay, is an American author, cultural critic, mathematician and conspiracy theorist. He is known for the grievance studies affair, in which he, Peter Boghossian and ...
made the idea that the map is not reality a primary theme of his 2013 book ''Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly''. In it, he argues that all of our scientific theories, mathematics, and even the idea of God are conceptual maps often confused "for the terrain" they attempt to explain. In a foreword to the book, physicist Victor J. Stenger expresses agreement with this point of view.Lindsay, James A. (2013). ''Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly'', Fareham: Onus BooksRalph Rumney (5 June 1934 – 6 March 2002), English artist, and member of the
Situationist International
The Situationist International (SI) was an international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists. It was prominent in Europe from its formation in 1957 to its dissolutio ...
titled one of his autobiographical memoirs ''The Map is not the Territory.''
Relationship
Gregory Bateson, in "Form, Substance and Difference", from '' Steps to an Ecology of Mind'' (1972), argued the essential impossibility of knowing what any actual territory is. Any understanding of any territory is based on one or more sensory channels reporting adequately but imperfectly:
Elsewhere in that same volume, Bateson argued that the usefulness of a map (a representation of reality) is not necessarily a matter of its literal truthfulness, but its having a structure analogous, for the purpose at hand, to the territory. Bateson argued this case at some length in the essay "The Cybernetics of “Self”: A Theory of Alcoholism" (1971).
To paraphrase Bateson's argument, a culture that believes that
common colds
The common cold or the cold is a viral infectious disease of the upper respiratory tract that primarily affects the respiratory mucosa of the nose, throat, sinuses, and larynx. Signs and symptoms may appear fewer than two days after exposur ...
are transmitted by evil spirits, that those spirits fly out of people when they sneeze, can pass from one person to another when they are inhaled or when both handle the same objects, etc., could have just as effective a "map" for public health as one that substituted microbes for spirits.
Another basic quandary is the problem of
accuracy
Accuracy and precision are two measures of '' observational error''.
''Accuracy'' is how close a given set of measurements (observations or readings) are to their '' true value'', while ''precision'' is how close the measurements are to each ot ...
. Jorge Luis Borges' " On Exactitude in Science" (1946) describes the tragic uselessness of the perfectly accurate, one-to-one map:
A more extreme literary example, the fictional diary of Tristram Shandy is so detailed that it takes the author one ''year'' to set down the events of a single ''day'' – because the map (diary) is more detailed than the territory (life), yet must fit into the territory (diary written in the course of his life), it can never be finished. Such tasks are referred to as " supertasks".
With this quotation of Josiah Royce, Borges describes a further conundrum of when the map is contained within the territory, infinite regress:
Neil Gaiman
Neil Richard MacKinnon GaimanBorn as Neil Richard Gaiman, with "MacKinnon" added on the occasion of his marriage to Amanda Palmer. ; ( Neil Richard Gaiman; born 10 November 1960) is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, gr ...
retells the parable in reference to storytelling in '' Fragile Things'' (it was originally to appear in '' American Gods''):
The development of electronic media blurs the line between map and territory by allowing for the
simulation
A simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. Simulations require the use of models; the model represents the key characteristics or behaviors of the selected system or process, whereas the ...
of ideas as encoded in electronic signals, as
Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard ( , , ; 27 July 1929 – 6 March 2007) was a French sociologist, philosopher and poet with interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as w ...
argues in '' Simulacra and Simulation'' (1994, p. 1):
The philosopher David Schmidtz draws on this distinction in his book ''Elements of Justice'', apparently deriving it from Wittgenstein's private language argument.
The fundamental trade-off between accuracy and usability of a map, particularly in the context of modelling, is known as
Bonini's paradox
Bonini's paradox, named after Stanford business professor Charles Bonini, explains the difficulty in constructing models or simulations that fully capture the workings of complex systems (such as the human brain).
Statements
In modern discours ...
, and has been stated in various forms, poetically by Paul Valéry: "Everything simple is false. Everything which is complex is unusable."
Historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith concluded his eponymous essay collection, ''Map is not Territory'' with a rejoinder to scholars that echoes the Borgesian analysis (1978, p. 309):
Emic and etic
In anthropology, folkloristics, and the social and behavioral sciences, emic () and etic () refer to two kinds of field research done and viewpoints obtained.
The "emic" approach is an insider's perspective, which looks at the beliefs, val ...
*
Fallacy of misplaced concreteness
Reification (also known as concretism, hypostatization, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical wikt:construct, construct) is treated as if it were a concrete real e ...
*
Good regulator
The good regulator is a theorem conceived by Roger C. Conant and W. Ross Ashby that is central to cybernetics. Originally stated that "every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system", but more accurately, every good regulator mus ...
Mary's room
The knowledge argument (also known as Mary's room or Mary the super-scientist) is a philosophical thought experiment proposed by Frank Cameron Jackson, Frank Jackson in his article "Epiphenomenal Qualia" (1982) and extended in "What Mary Didn't Kno ...
Nominalism
In metaphysics, nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels. There are at least two main versions of nominalism. One version denies the existence of universalsthings th ...
*
Non-Aristotelian logic Non-classical logics (and sometimes alternative logics) are formal systems that differ in a significant way from standard logical systems such as propositional and predicate logic. There are several ways in which this is done, including by way of ...
* ''
On the Content and Object of Presentations
''On the Content and Object of Presentations'' (german: Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen, "On the Doctrine of the Content and Object of Presentations") is an 1894 book by the Polish philosopher Kazimierz Twardowski, a student ...
Social constructionism
Social constructionism is a theory in sociology, social ontology, and communication theory which proposes that certain ideas about physical reality arise from collaborative consensus, instead of pure observation of said reality. The theory ...
*
Structural differential
The structural differential is a physical chart or three-dimensional model illustrating the abstracting processes of the human nervous system. In one form, it appears as a pegboard with tags. Created by Alfred Korzybski, and awarded a U.S. patent o ...
*
Surrogation
Surrogation is a psychological phenomenon found in business practices whereby a measure of a construct of interest evolves to replace that construct. Research on performance measurement in management accounting identifies surrogation with "the te ...
Unintended consequences
In the social sciences, unintended consequences (sometimes unanticipated consequences or unforeseen consequences) are outcomes of a purposeful action that are not intended or foreseen. The term was popularised in the twentieth century by Ameri ...