This contribution will consider our contemporary models of architectural reasoning and imagination in the context of the Anthropocene. In this context, architects habitually defer to a technocratic, scientistic posture to validate a range of design strategies and agendas, often through simulation techniques. But as the contemporary philosophy of science establishes, the ontology of projective simulations for buildings, cities and climates exists to simulate dynamics in contexts for which data are necessarily scarce (otherwise an experiment would provide more reliable knowledge). This scarcity of data, in turn, makes the process of validation a compromised, at best, proposition.Whilst the scientism of contemporary architecture is ostensibly secular in its disposition, its models of faith-based simulation suggest otherwise. However, in contexts for which data are scarce, as the philosopher Eric Winsberg observes, fables offer an alternative, dissimulating mode of knowledge production and transmission that imparts reliability precisely by announcing their often preposterous fictions, rather than concealing the murkiness of their ontology in scientistic representations. All of this raises numerous questions about our modes of architectural reasoning and imagination today. As architecture aims to address projective scenarios for which real data are scarce, our model of models must evolve.