The map is not the territory. This statement is very relevant to my project, but I only found out today that this is an Alfred Korzybski quote. I came across it in Evgeny Morozov’s piece on Tim O’Reilly. The first time I heard about Korzybski a couple of years ago was when I was doing my thesis on William S. Burroughs, on whom he had a huge influence. Korzybski was a pretty weird guy, but he had some interesting thoughts about language.
Relationship with my project: language is also a kind of map. Language influences how we perceive the world. Just like maps are never a one to one representation of reality, the same goes for language.