Concept
The parsimony rule
The simplest reading that accounts for the behavior is the correct one, and you stop at it. Derived from elegance rather than added as a caution: a second figure that leaves your next action unchanged is a patch, and patches are counted here as everywhere else. Guards both failures — over-reading, which stacks figures until a person is a diagram and feels like insight the whole way down; and under-reading, which collapses back into what someone simply is.
Where it appears
Treated in
- Part Five — The Standing ThirdsWhat This Catalogue Is NotFifty-two figures is a taxonomy, not a pantheon. Most people find four or five of them run their lives and the rest describe other people — that's the correct outcome.