The Map is Not the Territory


The map is not the territory.

Alfred Korzybski, 1932

The menu is not the meal.

Alan Watts

The “map is not the territory” is essentially what Jung implies in a previous post on projection:

There is nothing in or of the material world that is not a projection of the human mind.

Gregory Bateson, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), relates this further:

We say the map is not the territory.

But what is the territory?

Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper.

What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps.

The territory never gets in at all. … Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum.

 



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