Nicholas DiBella (Stanford): The World Is (Almost Surely) a Strange Place
Are simpler metaphysical theories more likely to be true than more complex theories? Many have thought that they are. Others have stayed silent on the question of likelihood but have argued that we ought to favor simplicity in our theories for various practical reasons. In this talk, I wish to set aside the question of the practical value of simplicity and, instead, focus squarely on the question of likelihood of truth. I shall argue that insofar as the special case of "quantitative" ontological complexity is concerned -- a measure of theory complexity according to which a theory has complexity C just in case it posits C-many things in total -- simpler theories are *not* more likely to be true; in fact, they are exceedingly *less* likely to be true. More precisely, I shall argue that for any (finite or transfinite) cardinal C, it is almost surely the case that the true metaphysical theory has quantitative-ontological complexity *greater* than C.