Alexander Pruss's Blog

It would be appealing to be able to hold on to all of the following: Four-dimensionalism. Elementary particles are simples. There is onl...

Some people think that simplicity of laws of nature is a guide to truth, and some think beauty of laws of nature is. One might ask: Is the b...

When I give talks about the way modern science is based on beauty, I give the example of how everyone will think Newton’s Law of Gravitation...

Often, the kind of beauty that scientists, and especially physicists, look for in the equations that describe nature is taken to have simpli...

I like to illustrate the evidential force of simplicity by noting that for about two hundred years people justifiably believed that the forc...

One of the forces of nature that the physicists don’t talk about is the flexi force, whose value between two particles of mass m 1 and m 2 ...

The number of degrees of freedom in a system is the number of numerical parameters that need to be set to fully determine the system. Scient...

According to haecceitism as I shall understand it, there are vast numbers (probably infinitely many) possible worlds that are just like ours...

Depending on metaphysics, wholes depend on their parts or the parts depend on the wholes. But nothing depends on itself: that would be a vic...

Consider these two candidates for fundamental physical equations: G =8π T G =(8+π) T . These two equations are equally simple. (The second...

It's oft stated that Ockham's razor favors the B-theory over the A-theory, other things being equal. But the theoretical gain here i...

Suppose we want to explain why one tortoise doesn't fall down, and we explain this by saying that it's standing on two tortoises. An...

One of the main objections against Platonism is that it offends against Ockham's razor by positing a large number of fundamental entitie...

Inference to best explanation is central to our epistemic lives. Aesthetic judgments about theories are central to inference to best explana...

It's a standard thought that art thrives on limitations. These may be imposed by the technical capacities of the medium (I was reading t...

Divine Belief Simplicity is the thesis that all of God's acts of belief are the same act of belief, the same belief token. While my be...

One measure of the simplicity of a proposition is the length of the shortest sentence expressing the proposition. Unfortunately, this me...

Simplicity is best understood linguistically (e.g., brevity of expression in the right kind of language). Simplicity is a succ...

Some naturalists say that theism needlessly complicates our view of the world by positing that in addition to the material concr...

I have argued elsewhere , as my colleague Trent Dougherty also has and earlier, that when we understand simplicity rightly, theism...