Map and territory. The problem of the referent in world's representations

Abstract

Alfred Korzybski’s statement that «the map is not the territory» is not as simple as it appears. Following Bateson’s ideas about the topic, we could compare the «territory» to the Kantian «Ding an sich», inaccessible background to perception and knowledge, subject to never-ending procedures of “objectivation”; but if «territory» is conceived as strictly speaking inaccessible, our maps can make reference only to other maps. Dealing with this issue, this article considers some variants of the map-territory problem, and argues that an human observer knows and elaborates beliefs in an intermediate dimension between symbolic-conceptual maps and perceptual territories.