“Western philosophy and science have for the most part been committed to the Simplicity Theory of Truth: the simplest theory that accounts for the data is the true theory. (Theories are simplest which postulate the fewest entities, require the fewest hypotheses, generate predictions by the fewest calculations, etc.) ...If someone believes that the world is made for him to have dominion over and he is made to exploit it, he must believe that he and the world are so made that he can, at least in principle, achieve and maintain dominion over everything. But you can’t put things to use if you don’t know how they work. So he must believe that he can, at least in principle, understand everything. If the world exists for man, it must be usably intelligible, which means it must be simple enough for him to understand. A usable universe is an intelligible universe is a simple universe. ...And so it goes with the philosophy and the science of The Arrogant Eye.”

— Marilyn Frye , book The Politics of Reality

Source: The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (1983), p. 71

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Marilyn Frye 8

feminist philosopher and professor 1941

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Source: An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition), Chapter V, Conditional Probability, Stochastic Independence, p. 132.

“In the years after 1936, whilst Hayek was working on The Pure Theory of Capital, most economists were convinced by Keynes, whose theory had an elegance and simplicity that Hayek’s did not. Keynes’ theory lacked Hayek’s theoretical rigor in that it was not based on equilibrium (on individual rationality), and there were places in the argument where Keynes relied on loose, informal arguments, preferring to put his trust in intuition rather than formal theory. Keynesians did not solve the problems with capital theory that Hayek had identified: they just bypassed or ignored them. According to Hayek’s methodological criteria, Keynes’ theory was decidedly inferior. Against this, Keynes’ theory provided opportunities for mathematical and statistical analysis that Hayek’s did not. Indeed, though Hayek paid some attention to data, he did so only minimally: he certainly made no attempt to test his theory against statistical data. The choice of Keynesian theory was, at least in part, a methodological one.”

Roger Backhouse (economist) (1951) British economist

"Hayek on money and the business cycle", 2006

“Think of a hypothesis as a card. A theory is a house made of hypotheses.”

Marilyn vos Savant (1946) US American magazine columnist, author and lecturer

Attributed in Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (1991)

“The paradigm of physics - with its interplay of data, theory and prediction - is the most powerful in science.”

Geoffrey West (1940) British physicist

2010s
Source: Joao Medeiros. " The city in numbers: An equation that explains urban life http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/05/start/the-city-in-numbers," in wired.co.uk/magazine 29 March 2011.

“Theory is taught so as to make the student believe that he or she can become a Marxist, a feminist, an Afrocentrist, or a deconstructionist with about the same effort and commitment required in choosing items from a menu.”

Edward Said book Culture and Imperialism

Culture and Imperialism (1993), Chap 4, Sect 2

“The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct.”

William of Ockham (1285–1349) medieval philosopher and theologian

“The best works are often those with the fewest and simplest elements.... until you look at them a little more, and things start to happen.”

Clyfford Still (1904–1980) American artist

As quoted in Abstract Expressionism, Davind Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd London, 1990, p. 137
1950s

“Under the administration of Rhodes, there were the fewest laws, the widest freedom, the least crime, and the turest justice, that I have ever seen in any part of the world.”

Frederick Russell Burnham (1861–1947) father of scouting; military scout; soldier of fortune; oil man; writer; rancher

Scouting on Two Continents (1926)

“The Steady State theory was what Karl Popper would call a good scientific theory: it made definite predictions, which could be tested by observation, and possibly falsified. Unfortunately for the theory, they were falsified.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

The Beginning of Time (1996)

“A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Remark to scientist Herman Francis Mark
1940s, Only Then Shall We Find Courage (1946)

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