A premise in the philosophy of science due to William of Ockham Eric Weisstein's World of Biography which states that "entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." This is commonly interpreted to mean that the simplest of a set of competing viable theories is preferable.
Prior to the work of Born Eric Weisstein's World of Biography which led to the description of the laws of physics based on a set statistical probabilities, "preferable" was interpreted to mean "more likely to be correct."
References
Forster, M. R. and Sober, E. "How to Tell When Simpler, More Unified, or Less Ad Hoc Theories Will Provide More Accurate Predictions." Brit. J. Philos. Sci. 45, 1-35, 1994.
Good, I. J. "Corroboration, Explanation, Evolving Probability, and a Sharpened Razor." Brit. J. Philos. Sci. 19, 123-143, 1968.
Needham, S. and Dowe, D. L. "Message Length as an Effective Ockham's Razor in Decision Tree Induction." In 8th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AI+STATS 2001), Key West, Florida, U.S.A., Jan. 2001. 2001.
