Is this what everyone describes as “the map is not the territory”, or something else? I can imagine some other subtleties of being within a territory that an exact projection might not provide.
Personally I never think of this as something specific or quantitative as in fidelity.
In my head it’s more of a statement that the map is a representation, a reference, in the terminology of Stirner a spook or a phantom.
The territory is the thing itself, the visceral thing you exist in/on and can change, feel, experience.
This applies to anything that both exists and is represented, maps and land are just the best analogy.
Even a 1:1 scale map with 100% fidelity will never be the territory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation...
The one about the nigh-infinite library is best known (1)
The one about the map, "On Exactitude in Science", is very short indeed https://kwarc.info/teaching/TDM/Borges.pdf
The phrase was coined[0] by Alfred Korzybski who has some related stuff linked from his wiki page[1], though I'd give credit for the first+best modern explanation to Kant's work[2] on Sensibility (the first of four human cognitive faculties). I'm a Kantian cultist of sorts though, so take that with a grain of salt ;)
Certainly some would prefer to follow the idea all the way back to ancient Greece and/or China, or focus on more recent critiques of the concept by Hegel[3], Wittgenstein[4], or Deleuze[5]. I'm not a fan, but an even more (post-?)modern interpretation is Baudrillard's work on Simulacra.[6]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski
[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-spacetime/
[3] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hl...
[4] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#PhilInve
It's just a different popular reference. Specifically, this one is about the value of abstraction, while "the map is not the territory" is about model fidelity.