Juno_Watt comments on What do professional philosophers believe, and why? - Less Wrong Discussion
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No. But that is essentially true by definition. On the other hand, I think all causal claims are claims about abstract facts. E.g. when you say "The match caused the barn to burn to the ground" you're invoking a causal model of the world and models of the world are abstractions (though obviously they can be represented).
To me this is like hearing "If mass and velocity didn't exist Newtonian physics would be just as 'unreasonably effected'. Mathematical objects are part of mathematics. The fact that math is unreasonably effective is why we can say mathematical facts are true and mathematical entities exist. Just like the fact that quantum theory is unreasonably effective is the reason we can say that quarks exist. This is true of just everyday objects too. We say your chair exists because the chair is the best way of explaining some of your sensory impressions. It just happens that not all entities are particulars embedded in the causal world.
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.