Figure 8.

The proximal pattern in (a) is readily interpreted as a parallelogram partly occluding the shape in (b) rather than the shape in (c). By the likelihood principle, this could be explained by arguing that (c) would have to take a more coincidental position to yield (a); this argument relies on real conditional probabilities and ignores real prior probabilities which are unknown but which, if included, might well undermine this argument. By the simplicity principle, the prior complexities (of the objects as such) and the conditional complexities (of the objects’ relative positions in the pattern) converge on a predicted preference for the shape in (b).