the map is not the territory

the map is not the territory

A person or thing is completely separate from the judgments or perceptions that people place upon it. The phrase was coined by US semanticist Alfred Korzybski. I know you dislike Ed because of how he acted in that meeting, but you don't actually know him. Just keep in mind that the map is not the territory, OK?
See also: map, not, territory
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.
See also:
  • a penny for them
  • (as) sure as eggs (is eggs)
  • death and taxes, (certain as)
  • the medium is the message
  • be twiddling (one's) thumbs
  • be twiddling your thumbs
  • 57
  • and the rest
  • and how
  • and how!
References in periodicals archive
The third idea is that the Map is Not the Territory. It is a humbling notion for a writer because I am busy producing maps, and that is my function in life-aside from being human.
Finally, the Map is Not the Territory leads me to the notion that all assumptions should be challenged.
And I also realized that, as Gregory Bateson puts it, "The map is not the territory." I had become fully acquainted with the map as a student.
The works in the project's second half, "The map is not the territory," dealt directly with the supposed territory of Hamburg.
We would be like the cartographers in Jorge Luis Borges' short story "Histoire de l'Infamie." Borges imagined an empire where cartographers were so careful to get every minute detail on their map that they ended up creating "a map of the same size as the Empire, that perfectly duplicated it." The map is not the territory, otherwise it would be useless.
The map is not the territory, so there is no not territory.
Now let us go back to the first principle, which can be stated as "The map is not the territory," that is, the word is not the thing it represents.
I also like to keep my students writing, which is how I came to write, "The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing" on my board.