作品名为La trahison des images/The Treachery of Images/形象的叛逆，由雷內·馬格利特/René François Ghislain Magritte创作，收藏于Los Angeles County Museum of Art。
“The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe", I'd have been lying!”
—— René Magritte
和Alfred Korzybski的“The map is not the territory”有着异曲同工—— Humans are limited in what they know by (1) the structure of their nervous systems, and (2) the structure of their languages. Humans cannot experience the world directly, but only through their "abstractions" (nonverbal impressions or "gleanings" derived from the nervous system, and verbal indicators expressed and derived from language). These sometimes mislead us about what is the truth. Our understanding sometimes lacks similarity of structure with what is actually happening.
Additionally, he thought that certain uses of the verb "to be", called the "is of identity" and the "is of predication", were faulty in structure, e.g., a statement such as, "Elizabeth is a fool" (said of a person named "Elizabeth" who has done something that we regard as foolish). In Korzybski's system, one's assessment of Elizabeth belongs to a higher order of abstraction than Elizabeth herself. Korzybski's remedy was to deny identity; in this example, to be aware continually that "Elizabeth" is not what we call her. We find Elizabeth not in the verbal domain, the world of words, but the nonverbal domain (the two, he said, amount to different orders of abstraction). This was expressed by Korzybski's most famous premise, "the map is not the territory". Note that this premise uses the phrase "is not", a form of "to be"; this and many other examples show that he did not intend to abandon "to be" as such. In fact, he said explicitly[citation needed] that there were no structural problems with the verb "to be" when used as an auxiliary verb or when used to state existence or location. It was even acceptable at times to use the faulty forms of the verb "to be," as long as one was aware of their structural limitations.
相关阅读：Michel Foucault/福柯的Les Mots et les choses: un archeologie des sciences humaines/The Order of Things/词与物：Every historical period has underlying epistemic assumptions, ways of thinking, which determine what is truth and what is acceptable discourse about a subject, by delineating the origins of biology, economics, and linguistics.
