Labelling

Humans love to categorize things. It is comforting, because the mysterious is frightening. We encounter new things, and struggle to fit it into our existing categories. When this doesn't work, we invent a new category. We generally explain this new category in terms of being a hybrid of two old categories or some such. This applies well to the world of physics, where we need a metaphor based on the scale we are familiar with to make sense of things (i.e. particles are like billiard balls, or waves).
However, like most things, we take it too far. We often apply a label to something and allow the label to function as an answer. Q:"Why does matter attract matter?" A:"Matter curves spacetime". I remember hearing this explanation along with a nice little diagram of a ball making a dip that other balls would roll towards. We use a label and feel like we know the answer. We then leave the underlying questions unanswered. Why does matter curve spacetime? What do we mean by spacetime? Is there a uniform background against which we can measure curvature? Why would a curve necessarily lead to attraction anyway?
This type of thinking very handily displays a cognitive bias towards things that are understandable in terms of the environment we are adapted to. Of course our descriptions of reality break down at the very small and the very large. The place where they break down are the natural boundaries beyond which our common sense (adapted to running from predators on a prairie) can no longer make a metaphor out of things we observe at our scale.

Of course this doesn't explain why our math should continue to consistently apply at all scales...maybe it doesn't.