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Rival Visions of Parsimony

“Parsimony” is a vague and divisive concept in political science. I identify three distinct but often conflated conceptions of parsimony. The aesthetic conception emphasizes a theory's elegance and clarity; the ontological conception, drawing upon the hard sciences, posits that the world is governed by simple fundamental laws. Neither applies in international relations theory or to social science more broadly. Instead, only the epistemological conception—abstracting from reality to highlight recurring patterns and build testable propositions—justifies parsimony. This view is not a naive simplification of the world but a self-conscious capitulation to its complexity. Though both critics and supporters of parsimony often do not distinguish among these three “visions,” doing so has important implications for how we think about evaluating theories.