Every symbolic system — a religion, a political ideology, a scientific paradigm, a legal order — makes claims about the world that exceed what it can strictly demonstrate. This is not a defect but a feature: symbolic systems must overreach in order to function as systems at all. A framework that only claimed what it could prove would be too thin to organise social life.
But overreach has costs. When the gap between a system's claims and its deliverables becomes too wide, the system loses legitimacy. This is what LVT calls symbolic overreach: not the mere fact of making large claims, but the specific pathology that arises when those claims can no longer be sustained by the system's actual performance.