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156 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
(1) conservatism: the fewer existing beliefs the new belief would interfere with, the better;The book is in some sense excellent, but it suffers from being a product of its time. A structuralist view of language, a behaviorist view of psychology, and a logicist understanding of science hangs over the work, all positions which I will not attempt to refute here, but which I think there are good reasons not to believe.
(2) modesty: one hypothesis is more modest than another if it logically implies fewer other beliefs;
(3) simplicity: keep a single belief as simple as possible in its relation to other beliefs, but "[w]e cheerfully sacrifice simplicity of a part for greater simplicity of the whole when we see a way of doing so";
(4) generality: "[t]he wider the range of application of a hypothesis, the more general it is";
(5) refutability: "some imaginable event, recognizable if it occurs, must suffice to refute the hypothesis"; and
(6) precision: if a hypothesis states precisely its principles and parameters for measuring the occurrence of some event, then it is not easy to dismiss as coincidence.