Simplicity has long been recognized as an apparent mark of truth in science, but it is difficult to explain why simplicity should be accorded such weight. This chapter examines some standard, statistical explanations of the role of simplicity in scientific method and argues that none of them explains, without circularity, how a reliance on simplicity could be conducive to finding true models or...

This paper investigates spirolaterals for their beauty of form and the unexpected complexity arising from them. From a very simple generative procedure, spirolaterals can be created having great complexity and variation. Using mathematical and computer-based methods, issues of closure, variation, enumeration, and predictictability are discussed. A historical review is also included. The overrid...

In their new book Relativism and Monadic Truth, Herman Cappelen and John Hawthorne seek to defend a " mainstream " view of the contents of thought and talk, which they call Simplicity, against recent " analytic relativist " here-says (including my own). Simplicity consists in five theses: T1 There are propositions and they instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth simpliciter and ...

I’ve spent over 20 years implementing algorithms for Boolean minimization, with particular application to area optimization of large semiconductor circuits. This exploration has included almost all published algorithms, dozens of conventional and exotic data structures, over two dozen programming languages and styles, and almost every level of implementation, from reconfigurable silicon through...

This dissertation investigates the possibility of justifying simplicity principles in science. The labor of these projects is organized into three chapters. The first chapter introduces some of the key authors and issues in the history of simplicity in science. This chapter also gives a detailed discussion of the work of the 19th century physicists Le Verrier and Newcomb who played a crucial ro...

We introduce a natural strengthening of prompt simplicity which we call strong promptness, and study its relationship with existing lowness classes. This notion provides a ≤wtt version of superlow cuppability. We show that every strongly prompt c.e. set is superlow cuppable. Unfortunately, strong promptness is not a Turing degree notion, and so cannot characterize the sets which are superlow cu...

It should be stressed that although many phenomena are complex, 15 the concept of ‘complexity’ is more specific. Complexity is the study of complex adaptive systems. These have been defined as ‘a collection of individual agents with freedom to act in ways that are not always totally predictable, and whose actions are interconnected so that one agent’s actions changes the context for other agent...

The latest charge against parsimony in phylogenetic inference is that it involves estimating too many parameters. The charge is derived from the fact that, when each character is allowed a branch length vector of its own (instead of the homogeneous branch lengths assumed in current likelihood models), the results for likelihood and parsimony are identical. Parsimony, however, can also be derive...

Part One of my dissertation is about composite objects: things with proper parts, like plates, planets, plants and people. I begin chapter 1 by pointing out that if one were to judge by the way we normally speak about composite objects, one would suppose that we were all completely certain of a theory I call folk mereology. For instance, we seem to be completely convinced that whenever some thi...