Could you expand on that? It has never been clear to me what music theory is — what constitutes true or false claims about the structure of a piece of music, and what constitutes evidence bearing on such claims.
You're in good company, because it's never been clear to music theorists either, even after a couple millennia of thinking about the problem.
However, I do have my own view on the matter. I consider the music-theoretical analogue of "matching the territory" to be something like data compression. That is, the goodness of a musical theory is measured by how easily it allows one to store (and thus potentially manipulate) musical data in one's mind.
Ideally, what you want is some set of concepts such that, when you have them in your mind, you can hear a piece of music and, instead of thinking "Wow! I have no idea how to do that -- it must be magic!", you think "Oh, how nice -- a zingoban together with a flurve and two Type-3 splidgets" , and -- most importantly -- are then able to reproduce something comparable yourself.
We recently established a successful Useful Concepts Repository. It got me thinking about all the useless or actively harmful concepts I had carried around for in some cases most of my life before seeing them for what they were. Then it occurred to me that I probably still have some poisonous concepts lurking in my mind, and I thought creating this thread might be one way to discover what they are.
I'll start us off with one simple example: The Bohr model of the atom as it is taught in school is a dangerous thing to keep in your head for too long. I graduated from high school believing that it was basically a correct physical representation of atoms. (And I went to a *good* high school.) Some may say that the Bohr model serves a useful role as a lie-to-children to bridge understanding to the true physics, but if so, why do so many adults still think atoms look like concentric circular orbits of electrons around a nucleus?
There's one hallmark of truly bad concepts: they actively work against correct induction. Thinking in terms of the Bohr model actively prevents you from understanding molecular bonding and, really, everything about how an atom can serve as a functional piece of a real thing like a protein or a diamond.
Bad concepts don't have to be scientific. Religion is held to be a pretty harmful concept around here. There are certain political theories which might qualify, except I expect that one man's harmful political concept is another man's core value system, so as usual we should probably stay away from politics. But I welcome input as fuzzy as common folk advice you receive that turned out to be really costly.