Exactly. And it works the other way round also. If you know that throwing seeds into the ground will yield plants you can gain theoretical knowledge from that.
Edit: I think my example was not that good. I'll give another one: if you can fold paper planes that fly you can gain theoretical knowledge for building a real plane. This is what models are for.
(Since there didn't seem to be one for this month, and I just ran across a nice quote.)
A monthly thread for posting any interesting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently on the Internet, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages.