Occam's razor
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Occam's razor (or Ockham's razor) is a principle from philosophy. It says that the simplest explanation is usually the best one.
William of Ockham, a Franciscan friar who studied logic in the 14th century, first made it well known. The principle says that if there are several possible ways that something might have happened, the way that has the least guesses involved is probably the right one. In Latin this is sometimes called lex parsimoniae, or "the law of briefness". William of Ockham wrote it as:
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem'.'
This can be translated as:
Things shouldn't be done more times than they need to be.
In other words, you don't need to think of a lot of other explanations for something when you already have a simple one.
Occam's razor often comes up in medicine when there are many explanations for symptoms and the simplest diagnosis usually is the correct one.