Simplicity
Alan Baker,
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
Dec 22, 2016
Keep it simple. Yes, that excellent advice - but what exactly do we mean by "simplicity". As this article notes, on the one hand there's ontological simplicity, in which the fewest number of objects possible is contemplated. But there's also syntactic simplicity, in which the shortest formal principles are employed. And what about causal simplicity, which prefers the fewest number of causes for each event? This raises the question of why we would prefer simplicity at all. I face that a lot - education is filled with simply explanations and principles that are probably wrong.
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