{"id":12051,"date":"2022-09-18T03:10:46","date_gmt":"2022-09-18T10:10:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=12051"},"modified":"2024-03-21T02:51:51","modified_gmt":"2024-03-21T09:51:51","slug":"what-we-imagine-to-be-the-territory-is-usually-another-map","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=12051","title":{"rendered":"What We Imagine to Be the Territory Is Usually Another Map"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As is often noted, <span style=\"font-style: italic ;\">the map is not the<\/span> <span style=\"white-space: nowrap ;\"><span style=\"font-style: italic ;\">territory.<\/span><span style=\"vertical-align: top ; font-size: smaller ;\">&#91;1&#93;<\/span><\/span>  But what is usually missed is that, when we attempt to think of how they differ, we most often slip into specifics such that what we really compare is <em>not<\/em> the map with the territory, but the thing first recognized to be a map with a <em>mental map<\/em> of the territory.<\/p> <p>Our efforts to think about how <em>models<\/em> differ from <em>reality<\/em> are usually likewise characterized by comparisons between some model and some <em>other<\/em> model not recognized to be a model.  When we abandon <em>specifics<\/em>, and attempt to think of reality <em>in the abstract<\/em>, we almost always think of what amounts not to reality but to a hypothetical, unknown, <em>perfect<\/em> model of reality.<\/p> <hr width=\"50%\" align=\"left\" style=\"width: 50% ; text-align: left ; margin-left: 0; margin-right: auto ;\" \/> <p><span style=\"vertical-align: top ; font-size: smaller ;\">&#91;1&#93;<\/span> with Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski being the first to put it just that way<\/p> ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As is often noted, the map is not the territory.&#91;1&#93; But what is usually missed is that, when we attempt to think of how they differ, we most often slip into specifics such that what we really compare is not the map with the territory, but the thing first recognized to be a map with [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,720,175,4],"tags":[1653,1652,1651,1654,218],"class_list":["post-12051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-epistemology","category-philosophy","category-public","tag-modeling","tag-modelling","tag-models","tag-reality","tag-representation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12051"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12433,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12051\/revisions\/12433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}