“When multiple explanations exist, the simplest is usually correct.”
Dan Brown book Deception Point
Source: Deception Point
“The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct.”
Last update Sept. 13, 2022. History
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Do you have more details about the quote "The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct." by William of Ockham?
William of Ockham13
medieval philosopher and theologian 1285–1349Related quotes
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Context: It is man's intelligence that makes him so often behave more stupidly than the beasts. … Man is impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as punishment for its transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for example would kill one of its foals to make the wind change direction. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough.
David D. Friedman (1945) American economist, physicist, legal scholar, and libertarian theorist
Price Theory: An Intermediate Text, 1986
“Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.”
Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …
