[jd007]

I tend to think of "generalization", in the general sense (pun not intended), to be information compression.

We are simply trying to answer the question: what is the shortest description (i.e. most informationally compressed/dense version) that fits what we see in this infinite (at least to us mortals) universe of ours? Mathematically the length of such a description can be thought of as the Kolmogorov complexity.

Edit: I should add, the information compression performed when generalizing can (and often is) lossy.