Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The simplicity of a hypothesis for a person cannot be measured by the simplicity of the person's representation of that hypothesis (for example, the number of symbols used), because any hypothesis can be represented with a single symbol. A better measure of simplicity is the ease with which the hypothesis can be used to account for actual and foreseeable data. But it is also important to allow for different ways in which data might be represented. W e suggest that the relevant ways of representing data are those ways in which the person is interested, i.e., those representations that most directly help to answer questions the person wants to answer. In particular, we suggest that the simplicity of a hypothesis for a person is determined by the shortness of the connection between that hypothesis and the data that interest the person, as measured by the number of intermediate steps he or she needs to appreciate in order to appreciate the complete connection.