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Is Simplicity Evidence of Truth?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2007

Adolf Grünbaum
Adolf Grünbaum
Affiliation:
Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA. 15260-2510, U.S.A. E-mail: grunbaum@pitt.edu Website: www.pitt.edu/~grunbaum/
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Extract

In a short 1997 book entitled Simplicity as Evidence of Truth, the Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne has put forward the following thesis summarily: ‘… for theories (of equal scope) rendering equally probable our observational data (which, for brevity I shall call equally good at “predicting”), fitting equally well with background knowledge, the simplest is most probably true’.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 61: Philosophy of Science , October 2007 , pp. 261 - 275
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2007

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Footnotes

1

This paper was also delivered at All Souls College, Oxford University (March, 2006).