>“The map is not the territory” is a phrase coined by the Polish-American philosopher and engineer Alfred Korzybski. He used it to convey the fact that people often confuse models of reality with reality itself.

> According to Korzybski, models stand to represent things, but they are not identical to those things. Even at their best, models require interpretation. They are imperfect because they are, by definition, an abstraction of some larger complexity. Furthermore, we often misunderstand their limitations, preferring an incorrect model to no model at all. It’s human nature.

>ある物から派生した抽象 (abstraction) またはその物への反応 (reaction) はその物それ自体ではない

>地図はそれが表す現地そのものではない。しかし、もし正確であれば、それは現地に似た構造を有しており、そのことがそれの有用性を生み出す。

> A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.