 The third and final question from Section 1 concerns potential justifications for principles of ontological parsimony such as Occam’s Razor. The demand for justification of such principles can be understood in two importantly distinct ways, corresponding to the distinction between epistemic principles and methodological principles made at the end of Section 1. Justifying an epistemic principle requires answering an epistemic question: why are parsimonious theories more likely to be true? Justifying a methodological principle requires answering a pragmatic question: why does it make practical sense for theorists to adopt parsimonious  theories?[7]  Most attention in the literature has centered on the first, epistemic question. It is easy to see how syntactic elegance in a theory can bring with it pragmatic advantages such as being more perspicuous, being easier to use and manipulate, and so on. But the case is more difficult to make for ontological  parsimony.[8]  It is unclear what particular pragmatic disadvantages accrue to theories which postulate extra kinds of entities; indeed—as was mentioned in the previous section—such postulations can often bring with them striking syntactic simplification.