Occam's razor, Ockham's razor, Ocham's razor (Latin: novacula Occami), or the principle of parsimony or law of parsimony (Latin: lex parsimoniae) is the problem-solving principle that "entities should not be multiplied without necessity", sometimes inaccurately paraphrased as "the simplest explanation is usually the best one." The idea is attributed to English Franciscan friar William of Ockham (c.  1287–1347), a scholastic philosopher and theologian who used a preference for simplicity to defend the idea of divine miracles. This philosophical razor advocates that when presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction, one should select the solution with the fewest assumptions, and that this is not meant to be a way of choosing between hypotheses that make different predictions