The statement ''map is not territory'' for the first time was used by Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950) and since then is often repeated to describe differences between the real and mental worlds.
He 'was a Polish-American independent scholar who developed a field called general semantics, which he viewed as both distinct from, and more encompassing than, the field of semantics'. He argued that human knowledge of the world is limited by the nervous system and languages, and therefore no one can have direct access to reality, because we can only know what is filtered through brain responses.
