Are you an Occamist?
Someone once quoted Shakespeare to the philosopher W. V. O. Quine: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." The remark was meant as a put-down, a sort of "Yeah, what do you know?" To which Quine is said to have responded: "Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth." Quine was an Occamist.
On the other hand, I have heard that in an episode of The X-Files, Fox Mulder dismisses Occam's razor by renaming it Occam's Principle of Unimaginative Thinking. Let a thousand paranormal and pseudoscientific flowers bloom. Mulder is an Anti-Occamist.
Interesting post on Occam's Razor here.
6 comments:
I'm an Occamist most of the time. "the most likely explanation is the most likely" - how do you decide which is the most likely? Occam's razor says simplicity is a good guideline to deciding on the most likely explanation.
Well, my PhD is all about Occam :) It is sometimes possible to measure the simplicity of theories and compare these measures (in my case statistical models). The description of the model and the data given the model should together be as small as possible - then you have a good model.
Incidentally, Occam is God's deathblow. A description of Nature without God is simpler as one including God, given the lack of empirical evidence otherwise. (Actually this is a can of worms not to be opened lightly, as many descriptions of natural phenomena could be reduced to "God did it".)
Ludwig
Yes, Occam is not all there is to being rational. It explains why simple lies are more often believed than big long one's, but it doesn't explain why the simple lie is nevertheless a lie.
"Incidentally, Occam is God's deathblow."
This is an epistemological position that is increasingly difficult to defend, in view of strong theistic counterarguments by the likes of Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig.
These render the naturalistic position more unparsimonious than the theistic position, in that they highlight formal weaknesses in the metaphysical doctrine of physicalism, with respect to cosmology, epistemology, teleology and moral philosophy.
Atheist philosophers now stay clear of the law of parsimony in contending theism in view of these problems.
Thanks for your excellent guide man
Pretoria and Umhlanga
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