Today, a short quip from Isaac Asimov:
When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
No map perfectly reflects the territory — but in recognizing this, there’s a tendency to go full-relativist, and to think that the whole business of map-making is built on shaky ground.
We should remember that some theories really are more accurate than others. There is a reality, and we are tracking it. Moreover, we’re making progress over time, refining our previous coarse approximations of the coastlines and adding higher and higher grains of detail — or, on rare occasions, realizing the map was flipped and overturning the whole paradigm.