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Technical notes on a theory of simplicity

Abstract

Recently Samuel Richmond, generalizing Nelson Goodman, has proposed a measure of the simplicity of a theory that takes into account not only the polymorphicity of its models but also their internal homogeneity. By this measure a theory is simple if small subsets of its models exhibit only a few distinct (i.e., non-isomorphic) structures. Richmond shows that his measure, unlike that given by Goodman's theory of simplicity of predicates, orders the order relations in an intuitively satisfactory manner. In this note I formalize his presentation and suggest an improvement designed to overcome certain technical difficulties.

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Scott, B.M. Technical notes on a theory of simplicity. Synthese 109, 281–289 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00413770

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00413770

Keywords

  • Small Subset
  • Technical Difficulty
  • Order Relation
  • Satisfactory Manner
  • Internal Homogeneity