Mistaking the map for the territory is an informal fallacy that occurs when someone confuses the semantics of a term with what it represents. A similar term is "reification", where abstractions are taken to be a real thing.[1] Yet another similar term is the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness", which was coined by Alfred North Whitehead.[2] The name is a metaphorical representation of mistaking words and symbols for things that they could mean, rather than what they do mean or those things th...
