“The map is not the territory.” This phrase, which the Polish-American polymath Alfred Korzybski first expressed in 1931 and promulgated to a wider audience in his 1933 book Science and Sanity, has had many lives over the past century. It is alluded to in the titles of a collection of scholarly essays by the historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith (Map Is Not Territory) and Michel Houellebecq’s novel The Map and the Territory; it influenced Marshall McLuhan’s famous statement “The medium is the message.” More broadly, although few have read Science and Sanity in its entirety, Korzybski’s phrase and larger intellectual system are the backbone of the bestseller Language in Thought and Action by the English-professor-turned-senator S. I. Hayakawa.

The basic idea is that a representation or model of some thing—or, in the case of language, the word for some thing—is not the thing itself. As Korzybski put it:

Perhaps the most famous instantiation of this point is the Belgian surrealist René Magritte’s 1929 painting The Treachery of Images, which depicts a pipe with the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe).

On January 23, Korzybski’s phrase appeared in a surprising legal intervention: an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court by the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright David Mamet in support of the respondent in the case NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton, which the justices will be hearing on February 26. The brief, which Mamet submitted last year to the Fifth Circuit as well, is highly unusual. “Provid[ing]” what Mamet and the counsel of record say is “needed perspective on the issues in this case,” its argument takes the form of a “metaphorical short story,” contains no legal jargon or references, reminds us that the word “panic” comes from “the loss of the mind and will” to the Greek god Pan, and is copyrighted.

The story, titled “Lessons from Aerial Navigation,” is about a pilot who cannot reconcile what he sees from the air with what his map tells him. What matters, of course, is his position in the real world (“the territory below him is where he is”), not “where he calculated he should be.” With any luck, he can reorient himself. But what if he picked up the wrong map? And—these are the final words of the story—“what if the government and its privileged conduits prohibited him from choosing another?”

In short, the NetChoice case—actually two cases: it is being heard together with Moody v. NetChoice, LLC—concerns the practice of large social-media platforms such as Meta and TikTok, represented by the trade association NetChoice, to prohibit, or at least hinder, the dissemination of speech that they (whoever exactly “they” may be: sometimes federal officials) don’t like by “deplatforming” users or otherwise engaging in viewpoint-based restrictions. Does this violate the First Amendment? Much depends on whether these platforms should be considered “common carriers.” The views expressed in the briefs on both sides are fierce, and although I am sympathetic to the idea that the decision of the Fifth Circuit in favor of Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, should be affirmed, I greatly appreciate the careful report of July 2022 by Richard A. Epstein, which “propose[s] that it is unwise for anyone to make all-or-nothing judgments about the status of social platforms.”

Where does Mamet’s pilot come in? The statement of interest in Mamet’s brief notes that he

In the story, he moves from the pilot to ordinary citizens like himself, writing as follows:

I am not a lawyer and have no business commenting on what effect Mamet’s story should have on the justices. I am, however, interested in censorship and, as a linguist, pay attention to the ways in which language is used and abused. And this is where Korzybski comes back in—and Hayakawa, whose book Mr. Mamet was kind enough to tell me he read as “a teenager, and was moved by his observations.”

Seventy-four years after his death, Korzybski might have appreciated being invoked before the Supreme Court in this case: he was a great opponent of the sort of dogmatism that the major social-media platforms appear to be trying to enforce through censorship. As the phrase “The map is not the territory” and Korzybski’s commentary on it reveal, he thought a great deal about the limits of language and was particularly interested in how people’s efforts to transcend these limits lead to absolutist thinking.

More than anything else, Korzybski argued that speakers of English rely too heavily on the most common verb in the language, “to be.” In consequence, one of his disciples, D. David Bourland Jr., went so far as to devise and proselytize for E-Prime, a form of English that eschews all forms of this verb: “am,” “are,” “is,” “was,” “were,” “be,” “been,” and “being.” While doing without “to be” is almost always an exercise in cleverness rather than a socially rewarding endeavor, there are twenty-first-century lessons to be learned from such thought experiments.

Consider statements of the form “Noun is Noun” (e.g., “Kindness is everything”) and “Noun is Adjective” (e.g., “Science is real”). These are dogmatic, Korzybski claimed, and it is difficult for anyone to argue against would-be equivalences that are expressed essentially (Latin esse, “to be”)—especially when (to take examples that are salient today) few members of a functional society would wish to deride scientific inquiry, never mind object to the apparent tautology “Love is love.” To be sure, the most common of these ubiquitous yard signs begins with the phrase “In this house, we believe.” People who display them often act as though the beliefs were facts, but at least the introductory verb pays lip service to the notion that they might be wrong.

Aristotle’s idea that the definition of a word expresses essence was anathema to Korzybski, for whom there was no such thing as “is-ness.” His non-Aristotelian system, known as “general semantics,” is on the scholarly fringe these days, bearing little resemblance to semantics—the study of meaning—as philosophers and linguists usually understand the field. I will not defend general semantics as a movement: after all, it is tied to the largely discredited Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, according to which linguistic structure influences thought. Still, it is hard to object as such to the mission of the Institute of General Semantics: “promot[ing] the application of proven principles that guide advancements in critical thinking, rational behavior, and general sanity.” The problem is that the principles are not in fact proven.

Back to “The map is not the territory.” We need maps, but it is important to understand that they are imperfect, even when the distortions are not deliberate. I imagine that many people are aware that the Mercator projection is inaccurate, but few school systems stress this fact or provide their students with a different map of the world instead. Still, yes, some compromises are necessary since everyone would presumably agree that a map that has a perfect 1:1 correspondence with its territory—as in another short story, Jorge Luis Borges’s famous one-paragraph “On Exactitude in Science”  of 1946—is an absurdity.

Similarly, we need words—like “map,” “is,” “the,” etc.—but they, too, are imperfect. I imagine that many people understand that dictionaries are fallible, that the forms and meanings of words change, and that different speakers of what is held to be the same language have different understandings of the nuances of words. But these facts, too, are rarely stressed in schools. Again, though, some compromises are necessary since almost everyone would agree that the constructed language Lojban, which has the goal of eliminating all ambiguity, is not going to attract many speakers or general users.

David Mamet is much more than a playwright. He writes occasionally for National Review. He contributes a weekly cartoon to The Free Press. In 2022, he published a book titled Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch. And now he has submitted a brief to the Supreme Court.

What he says is important. No, let me change that: I believe that what he says is important. But I really do believe this.