Simplicity in Explanation

a being of the simplest essence’ ‘ The principle of

  The principle of ‘a being of the simplest essence’, basitulhaqiqah, is one of the most important one in transcendent philosophy upon which has been based the solution of many complicated and difficult problems. Now a question appears as: can the principle form a proof for the simplicity of the Necessary? In the paper, the principle has been analyzed and its background presented. Then it has ...

What Ockham's Razor Cuts: Quantifying simplicity in explanation choice

Observations from everyday life, the history of science, and well-controlled laboratory experiments suggest that when it comes to choosing between competing causal explanations, simplicity is an important factor. Less examined is the metric or metrics by which simplicity is quantified. Generally, it is assumed that simplicity can be described by counting the number of elements in an explanation...

Running head: SIMPLICITY IN EXPLANATION Occam’s Rattle: Children’s use of simplicity and probability to constrain inference

Simplicity and Goodness-of-Fit in Explanation: The Case of Intuitive Curve-Fitting

Other things being equal, people prefer simpler explanations to more complex ones. However, complex explanations often provide better fits to the observed data, and goodness-of-fit must therefore be traded off against simplicity to arrive at the most likely explanation. In three experiments, we examine how people negotiate this tradeoff. As a case study, we investigate laypeople’s intuitions ab...

Simplicity, Truth, and Probability

Simplicity has long been recognized as an apparent mark of truth in science, but it is difficult to explain why simplicity should be accorded such weight. This chapter examines some standard, statistical explanations of the role of simplicity in scientific method and argues that none of them explains, without circularity, how a reliance on simplicity could be conducive to finding true models or...