Alfred Korzybski famously said the map is not the territory; there are different ways in which the two may be conflated, and these are instructive.  

The ontological absolutist mistakenly believes in the possibility of an ideal map such that every feature of the territory (and indeed, of territories beyond the borders of the map) can be predicted from it:  if a feature is not in the map, it is not in the territory.  Which is to say, they believe the reality of the territory consistently and completely determines the content of this map to the point where it would be an infallible guide, and they believe furthermore that such a map is discoverable.  The totalitarian ontological absolutist (which is to say, the religious or ideological fanatic) believes that such a map is already in their possession, and the path to truth consists merely in forcing everyone to use it.  The nominalist or moral relativist, conversely, believes that the reality of a map consistently and completely determines the territory: everybody’s map is equally real for them, invent a map and you reify a truth.  And the totalitarian nihilist as a corollary believes that if you force everyone to use the map you have invented, you can create reality to suit yourself.  From one perspective, the moral absolutist and the moral relativist might seem to be at opposing ends of an ideological spectrum; but both at bottom make the same fundamental mistake of assuming a unidirectional and omnivalent determinacy between the territory and its representation, and it is for this reason that, though in apparent opposition, they are so often indistinguishable in their practice and its outcome.

None of this is how representation actually works.  Representation is an internalization of an external selection filter:  it makes pre-emptive selections based on past experience of the external filter’s operation in order to game filtration. But nothing constrains the external filter’s operation such that future behavior will perfectly replicate the past - indeed, things are guaranteed not to be so, insofar as the agent deploying the internal filter is by definition a part of the external and thus reciprocally subject to selection based on consequences of their own action in a way which is not learnable from experience of the prior filter before the agent learned it, becoming thereby a novel element in the scenario.  The universe, as J.B.S.Haldane said, is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose, and reality will always, as a matter of necessity, be, not less, but much greater than what we are able to articulate.