Alfred Korzybski remarked that ‘the map is not the territory’, encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself. Korzybski held that many people do confuse maps with territories, that is, confuse models of reality with reality itself.
Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Indian philosopher, described it thus, ‘The description is not the described’, to which he has further exemplified: ‘it is like a man who is hungry. Any amount of description of the right kind of food will never satisfy him. He is hungry, he wants food.’