&gt;a verbal&#x2F;symbolic model meant to account for the complexity of the world<p>I think you and I have very different notions of the word &quot;model.&quot; Rational spherical cows in a vacuum may not be precise or nuanced, but that doesn&#x27;t make them <i>inaccurate</i>, and the simplified view is a useful model for learning about big-picture concepts. It&#x27;s true that it won&#x27;t catch every corner case, and when you&#x27;re making decisions about human beings sometimes that&#x27;s dangerous, but there&#x27;s value at every level of granularity. Looking at each grain of sand and learning everything about the rock it came from will let you put it in the perfect place, but you&#x27;ll never build a sandcastle that way, and if you want to reshape the whole beach you&#x27;ll need yet another level of focus.<p>Generalization is a good thing. It&#x27;s powerful. Humans got where we are by spotting patterns - not because everything matches the pattern perfectly all the time, or even ever, but because you can see general commonalities and start to abstract them away into something that can be reasoned about.<p>If there&#x27;s one theory that explains more of the detail and variation in the world than another, at a finer granularity, without giving up generality, then yes, it&#x27;s clearly a superior theory. But throwing out highly general theories just because they aren&#x27;t perfect is intellectually lazy.