 Toy models. Toy models are extremely simplified and strongly distorted renderings of their targets, and often only represent a small number of causal or explanatory factors (Hartmann 1995; Reutlinger et al. 2018; Nguyen forthcoming). Typical examples are the Lotka–Volterra model in population ecology (Weisberg 2013) and the Schelling model of segregation in the social sciences (Sugden 2000). Toy models usually do not perform well in terms of prediction and empirical adequacy, and they seem to serve other epistemic goals (more on these in  Section 3).  This raises the question whether they should be regarded as representational at all (Luczak 2017).