 It should be noted that modern formulations of Occam’s Razor are connected only very tenuously to the 14th-century figure William of Ockham. We are not here interested in the exegetical question of how Ockham intended his ‘Razor’ to function, nor in the uses to which it was put in the context of medieval  metaphysics.[4]  Contemporary philosophers have tended to reinterpret OR as a principle of theory choice: OR implies that—other things being equal—it is rational to prefer theories which commit us to smaller ontologies. This suggests the following paraphrase of OR: