Issue 52, 1st quarter 2011
Experimental Philosophy
Mark Phelan
Pages 72-77
Just what are your intentions?
The desire for parsimony – to posit as few explanatory features as possible – has a rich philosophical history and is often given lots of weight in philosophical theory construction. But, as the psychologist Tania Lombrozo has demonstrated, our bias in favour of parsimony can lead us to adopt simple explanations even when it’s far more likely that a complicated explanation is correct.