Occam’s razor, also Ockham’s razor,[1] is the principle that “entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” It is apocryphally attributed to 14th-century English logician and Franciscanfriar, William of Ockham. The principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae (“law of parsimony“, “law of economy“, or “law of succinctness“): entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, roughly translated as “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.” An alternative version Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate translates “plurality should not be posited without necessity.”[2]
