The Map is Not the Territory
“The map is not the territory… The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map…” – Alfred Korzybski
According to a philosophical view called empiricism, all the knowledge we have about the world around us comes from our senses – what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. This view suggests that we are not born with any built-in knowledge or ideas. Instead, our minds are like a blank slate at birth, and everything we come to know is written onto that slate through our experiences. This process begins with receiving raw information from the world through our senses.
However, empiricism often suggests that our direct access is limited to the input from our senses, which philosophers sometimes call “ideas,” “impressions,” “sensations,” or “sense data”. We are immediately conscious of these internal feelings or perceptions. Think of the redness you see, the warmth you feel, or the sound you hear right now. These are the raw ingredients of our experience. According to some empiricist ideas, we are directly acquainted only with these internal sense data.
The things we commonly think of as physical objects – like tables, chairs, or apples – are not directly perceived in themselves, according to this perspective. Instead, these objects are understood as being constructed or inferred in our minds based on the patterns and combinations of these sense data. For example, when you see a red, round shape and feel a smooth surface, your mind puts these sensations together and interprets them as an apple. These physical objects are seen not as things we are directly acquainted with, but rather as “logical constructions” that we build up from the sense data we receive.
Our knowledge of these constructed objects, therefore, is not a direct “acquaintance” with them, but rather what can be called “knowledge by description” – knowledge we gain indirectly by describing and organising the sense data we have. This kind of inferred knowledge is seen as potentially fallible.
If physical objects are not directly given to us, but are constructed from our sensations, why do we believe so strongly that they exist independently of our minds? According to empiricism, our belief in the existence of these external physical objects is not something we are born with (not innate), nor is it something we arrive at purely through reason. Instead, it’s often viewed as an acquired disposition. Through repeated experiences of consistent patterns in our sense data – seeing the same collection of sensations reappear (like the red, round, smooth patch) – we develop a habit or tendency to expect these patterns and to assume they correspond to stable objects in the world.
The mind, in this view, isn’t just a passive receiver of perfect copies of the world. While empiricists emphasise that experience is the source of knowledge, some philosophers describe the mind as actively processing and making sense of this information. Instead of simply inspecting the world and getting “habituated” by exact replicas, our minds organise the sensory input and, in a sense, “project” concepts or frameworks onto it to create the stable, ordered world we perceive.
Because our understanding of physical objects is based on this process of receiving sense data, interpreting it, and constructing a picture of the world in our minds, our experience of the world is always “mediated”. The sense data and the mind’s activity of organising them act as intermediaries between the “world itself” (reality independent of our minds) and the world as we experience it. We experience an internal “model” or “representation” of the world, built from these mediated perceptions.
This means that we may have very little knowledge about what the world is “really like” outside of our experience of it. Our direct experience is not of independent reality, but of how reality appears to us, given our senses and minds. This makes our perception disturbingly relative to our own subjective makeup. We have no way of telling how accurate this internal copy or model is compared to the “original” world, because we cannot bypass our own minds and senses to take another, independent “closer look” at the world as it is in itself.
The implication of this mediated view is that we do not perceive “things in themselves,” but only their appearances or representations to us. This creates a fundamental “veil of perception”, making it a matter of inference whether our internal representations faithfully correspond to external objects. The critical issue that arises from this is a profound scepticism about whether we can have any certain knowledge about the existence or true nature of material things. If our direct awareness is limited to the internal model, we lack a way to step outside of our own perception to verify how accurately that model reflects the world “out there”.
Consequently, the empiricist commitment to experience, when combined with the idea of mediated perception, can lead to the unsettling conclusion that our knowledge is potentially limited to our subjective internal world, leaving objective external reality forever beyond our grasp!
