Wisdom and the Refusal to Simplify

Somewhere around the middle of the twentieth century, the word 'simple' became a compliment. Simple explanations were preferable to complex ones. Simple theories were elegant, and elegance was treated as evidence of truth. Midgley's response was that Ockham's razor cuts both ways. Yes, entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. But neither should they be reduced below necessity. The determination of what is necessary cannot be made by the razor itself — it can only be made by a thinker who knows the subject well enough to judge what can be left out without distortion and what cannot. The razor is a tool, not an oracle. The person who wields it without understanding is as dangerous as a person who wields a scalpel without understanding anatomy — capable of making clean cuts that happen to sever arteries.