Juno_Watt comments on What do professional philosophers believe, and why? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Causal claim may be expressed with abstract models, but that does not mean they are about abstract models. Causal models do not refer to themselves, in which case they would be about the abstract, they refer to whatever real-world thing they refer to.
Maths isn't unreasonably effective at understanding the world in the sense that any given mathematical truth is automatically also a physical truth. If one mathematical statement (eg an inverse square law of gravity) is physically true, and infinity of others (inverse cube law, inverse power of four...) is automatically false. So when we reify out best theories, we are reifying a small part of maths for reasons which aren't purely mathematical. There is not path from the effectiveness of some maths at describing the physical universe to the reification of all maths, because physical truth is a selection of the physically applicable parts of maths.