Map–territory relation

Tissot's indicatrices viewed on a sphere: all are identical circles.

The Behrmann projection with Tissot's indicatrices

The indicatrices demonstrate the difference between the 3D world as seen from space and 2D projections of its surface.

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. Mistaking the map for the territory is a logical fallacy that occurs when someone confuses the semantics of a term with what it represents. 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 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's "The menu is not the meal." The concept is thus quite relevant throughout ontology and applied ontology regardless of any connection to general semantics per se (or absence thereof). Its avatars are thus encountered in semantics, statistics, logistics, business administration, semiotics, 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 about the discrepancies: whether or not they are either negligible or significant in each context, how to reduce them (thus iterating a map, or any other model, to become a better version of itself), and so on.

History

The phrase "A map is not the territory" was first introduced by Alfred Korzybski in his 1931 paper "A Non-Aristotelian System and Its Necessity for Rigour in Mathematics and Physics," presented at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in New Orleans, and later reprinted in Science and Sanity (1933). Korzybski credits mathematician Eric Temple Bell for the related phrase, "the map is not the thing mapped." In the article, Korzybski states that "A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness."

The concept has been illustrated in various cultural works. Belgian surrealist René Magritte explored the idea in his painting The Treachery of Images, which depicts a pipe with the caption, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe"). Lewis Carroll, in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), describes a fictional map with a scale of "a mile to the mile," which proves impractical. Jorge Luis Borges similarly references a map as large as the territory in his short story "On Exactitude in Science" (1946). In his 1964 book Understanding Media, philosopher Marshall McLuhan argued that all media representations, including electronic media, are abstractions or "extensions" of reality.

The idea has influenced several modern works, including Robert M. Pirsig's Lila: An Inquiry into Morals and Michel Houellebecq's novel The Map and the Territory, the latter of which won the Prix Goncourt. The concept is also discussed in the work of Robert Anton Wilson and James A. Lindsay, who critiques the confusion of conceptual maps with reality in his book Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly.

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:

We say the map is different from 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.

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 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. Jorge Luis Borges' "On Exactitude in Science" (1946) describes the tragic uselessness of the perfectly accurate, one-to-one map:

In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild drew a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography saw the vast Map to be Useless and permitted it to decay and fray under the Sun and winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; and in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

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".

In his short story "Magias parciales del Quijote" (“Partial Magic of the Quixote”), Borges paraphrases Josiah Royce describing a further conundrum of infinite regress arising when the map is contained within the territory:

The inventions of philosophy are no less fantastic than those of art: Josiah Royce, in the first volume of his work The World and the Individual (1899), has formulated the following: 'Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been levelled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity.' Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictions.

— Jorge Luis Borges, Partial Magic of the Quixote (1949; trans. 1964)

Neil Gaiman retells the parable in reference to storytelling in Fragile Things (it was originally to appear in American Gods):

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory.

The development of electronic media blurs the line between map and territory by allowing for the simulation of ideas as encoded in simulacra, a copy without a real, a semiotic assemblage of references as Baudrillard argues in Simulacra and Simulation (1994, p. 1):

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory.

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, 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):

We need to reflect on and play with the necessary incongruity of our maps before we set out on a voyage of discovery to chart the worlds of other men. For the dictum of Alfred Korzybski is inescapable: 'Map is not territory'––but maps are all we possess.

See also

• All models are wrong
• Allegory of the cave
• Blind men and an elephant
• Direct and indirect realism
• Emic and etic
• Fallacy of misplaced concreteness
• Good regulator
• Knowledge argument
• Ludic fallacy
• Mental model
• Mind projection fallacy
• Nominalism
• Non-Aristotelian logic
• On the Content and Object of Presentations
• Philosophy of perception
• Reification (fallacy)
• Signified and signifier
• Social constructionism
• Structural differential
• Surrogation
• Symbolism (disambiguation)
• Unintended consequences
• Use–mention distinction
• When a white horse is not a horse