Comment by Isamu
2 days ago
>Otherwise you run into Borges’ map problem—if you want a map that contains all the details of the territory that it’s supposed to represent, then the map has to be the size of the territory itself.
Is this what everyone describes as “the map is not the territory”, or something else? I can imagine some other subtleties of being within a territory that an exact projection might not provide.
>“the map is not the territory”
Personally I never think of this as something specific or quantitative as in fidelity.
In my head it’s more of a statement that the map is a representation, a reference, in the terminology of Stirner a spook or a phantom.
The territory is the thing itself, the visceral thing you exist in/on and can change, feel, experience.
This applies to anything that both exists and is represented, maps and land are just the best analogy.
Even a 1:1 scale map with 100% fidelity will never be the territory.
Borges referenced it, but did not originate the idea or the phrase.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation...
It refers to Jorge Luis Borges, a writer of surreal and speculative stories.
The one about the nigh-infinite library is best known (1)
The one about the map, "On Exactitude in Science", is very short indeed https://kwarc.info/teaching/TDM/Borges.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel
Yes, Borges' and Lewis Carroll's stories are playful illustrations of 'the map is not the territory'. Or you could say they show that the map cannot be the territory.
Not quite -- it's certainly a famous related hypothetical/sub-problem, but the original is a much more fundamental point about human cognition being inherently representational.
The phrase was coined[0] by Alfred Korzybski who has some related stuff linked from his wiki page[1], though I'd give credit for the first+best modern explanation to Kant's work[2] on Sensibility (the first of four human cognitive faculties). I'm a Kantian cultist of sorts though, so take that with a grain of salt ;)
Certainly some would prefer to follow the idea all the way back to ancient Greece and/or China, or focus on more recent critiques of the concept by Hegel[3], Wittgenstein[4], or Deleuze[5]. I'm not a fan, but an even more (post-?)modern interpretation is Baudrillard's work on Simulacra.[6]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski
[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-spacetime/
[3] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hl...
[4] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#PhilInve
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_and_Repetition
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacrum
It's not. That map would still be a map, and not the territory.
It's just a different popular reference. Specifically, this one is about the value of abstraction, while "the map is not the territory" is about model fidelity.