Moving toward a less deceptive interface...
So how do we tell whether our mental model is closer to reality rather than just rhetorically convincing? The answer that has slowly emerged in philosophy and science is not a single test but a set of structural constraints that good models must satisfy. These constraints allow us to detect improvement without requiring direct access to reality. By setting these limits, we can check whether we are mentally moving closer to reality or moving away from it.
The second constraint is cross-verification from independent methods. If different measurement systems, theories, and experimental techniques converge on the same structure, it becomes unlikely that the result is merely an artifact of one cognitive framework. For example, the existence of atoms was supported independently by chemistry, physics, spectroscopy, and statistical mechanics long before atoms could be directly imaged. Convergence from independent lines of evidence increases the probability that our thinking captures something real.