Ockham’s Razor advises us to not multiply entities without necessity. Recently, Jonathan Schaffer and Karen Bennett have argued that we ought to replace Ockham’s Razor with the Laser, the principle that only advises us to not multiply fundamental entities without necessity. In this paper, I argue that Ockham’s Razor is preferable to the Laser. I begin by contending that the arguments offered for the Laser by Schaffer and Bennett are unpersuasive. Then I offer two cases of theory (...) assessment that I believe the Razor handles better than the Laser. Finally, I argue that accepting the Laser gives rise to a difficult explanatory challenge: It is difficult to explain why fundamental entities and non-fundamental entities ought to be treated differently in ontological parsimony assessments. A recurring secondary theme of the paper is that the most tempting ways of responding to my arguments frequently result in the Laser losing much of its significance for debates about ontology. Thus, not only is it difficult to defend a preference for the Laser over the Razor, but it is especially difficult to do so while maintaining the Laser’s dialectical significance. (shrink)

Ockham's razor, the principle of parsimony, states that simpler theories are better than theories that are more complex. It has a history dating back to Aristotle and it plays an important role in current physics, biology, and psychology. The razor also gets used outside of science - in everyday life and in philosophy. This book evaluates the principle and discusses its many applications. Fascinating examples from different domains provide a rich basis for contemplating the principle's promises and (...) perils. It is obvious that simpler theories are beautiful and easy to understand; the hard problem is to figure out why the simplicity of a theory should be relevant to saying what the world is like. In this book, the ABCs of probability theory are succinctly developed and put to work to describe two 'parsimony paradigms' within which this problem can be solved. (shrink)

In the article I undertake the question of the Ockham’s razor. I consider the basic version of this methodological postulate: entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. I propose to interpret this postulate as a criterion of non-existence. In this context I analyse the matter of accidental entities as well as the ontological principle of economy.

Language production and comprehension are intimately interrelated; and models of production and comprehension should, we argue, be constrained by common architectural guidelines. Levelt et al.'s target article adopts as guiding principle Ockham's razor: the best model of production is the simplest one. We recommend adoption of the same principle in comprehension, with consequent simplification of some well-known types of models.

Ockham's razor is one of the best-known and most useful tools in the philosopher's toolkit. Here Sharon Kaye explains how the razor works, and also how it may have come by its name.

The notion of de re truth (Conte, 2016) is put to work in this paper (§ 1). It introduces us to a confrontation between a metaphysics of desertic landscapes, as presented in a stunning poem by Achille Varzi and Claudio Calosi, The Tribulations of Philosophye (§ 2), and an ontology of the lifeworld, as a long-term project based on the key concept of bonds (De Monticelli, 2018). The rich and structured objects of the everyday world are infinite sources of information (...) and cognitive adventure (§§ 3, 3.1., 3.2). Or so I will claim against Varzi’s skepticism about ordinary language, common sense, and ontological realism (§ 4). Far from encouraging our minds to stick to concrete individual things, Ockham’s Razor has been the murder weapon in the dismission of concreteness and the sensible world from the intellectual horizon of Modernity (§§ 5, 6). The “Unitarian Tradition” is a half-playful denomination of a quite real, albeit ignored, alternative theory of individuality (and hence concreteness), brilliantly represented by Boethius, Duns Scotus, and Leibniz. Classic phenomenology quite independently revived it and brought it up to modern analytic standards of rigor and formality (§ 7). (shrink)

:While Bayesian methods are widely used in economics and finance, the foundations of this approach remain controversial. In the contemporary statistical literature Bayesian Ockham’s razor refers to the observation that the Bayesian approach to scientific inference will automatically assign greater likelihood to a simpler hypothesis if the data are compatible with both a simpler and a more complex hypothesis. In this paper I will discuss a problem that results when Bayesian Ockham’s razor is applied to nested economic models. (...) I will argue that previous responses to the problem found in the philosophical literature are unsatisfactory and develop a novel reply to the problem. (shrink)

In Logical Forms II Chateaubriand puts the simple question: Why should we accept Ockham’s razor? He blames the principle of reduction as an unjustified dogma of nominalism. In this paper I present a justification for it. Contrary to Russell`s conception of reduction as elimination, I propose the thesis that reduction is explanation.Em Logical Forms II, Chateaubriand levanta a questão: Por que deveríamos aceitar a navalha de Ockham? Ele critica esse princípio de redução como um dogma não justificado do nominalismo. (...) Neste artigo apresento uma justificativa para o princípio. Ao contrário da concepção de Russell de redução como eliminação, eu proponho a tese de que redução é explanação. (shrink)

William of Ockham (d. 1347) is well known for his commitment to parsimony and for his so-called ‘razor’ principle. But little is known about attempts among his own contemporaries to deflect his use of the razor. In this paper, I explore one such attempt. In particular, I consider a clever challenge that Ockham’s younger contemporary, Walter Chatton (d. 1343) deploys against the razor. The challenge involves a kind of dilemma for Ockham. Depending on how Ockham responds to (...) this dilemma, his razor will, Chatton argues, either prove unacceptably dull when it comes to determining ontological commitment or prove unacceptably sharp when it comes to determining commitments entailed by certain theological doctrines. While Chatton’s objection is subtle and interesting in its own right, the broader significance of the debate between these thinkers lies in the light it sheds on medieval approaches to issues surrounding metaphysical methodology. (shrink)

Ockham's razor asks that we not multiply entities beyond necessity. The razor is a powerful methodological tool, enabling us to articulate reasons for preferring one theory to another. There are those, however, who would modify the razor. Schaffer, for one, tells us that, ‘I think the proper rendering of Ockham's razor should be ‘Do not multiply fundamental entities without necessity’’. Our aim, here, is to challenge such re-workings of Ockham's razor.

Notes that the question of materialism's adequacy as a solution to the mind-body problem is important in psychology as fields supported by eliminative materialism aim to "cannibalize" psychology . A common argument for adopting a materialistic worldview, termed the "Raze Dualism argument" in reference to Ockham's razor, is based on the principle of parsimony. It states that materialism is to be considered the superior solution to the mind-body problem because it is simpler than the dualist alternative. In this (...) paper, a prominent version of this argument is critiqued via an analysis of each of its premises. Illustrative in general of the limitations of materialism, this argument is undermined by assumptions which do not withstand scrutiny. First, Ockham's razor is shown to be a problematic principle. Second, the question of empirical superiority or equality is unresolved. Finally, there are other alternatives to materialism that are equally parsimonious, such as idealism. The result of the argument is to reopen the case for idealism and dualism and to force the issue to be determined on other grounds. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

We begin by presenting William of Ockham's various formulations of his principle of parsimony, Ockham's Razor. We then define a reaction mechanism and tell a personal story of how Ockham's Razor entered the study of one such mechanism. A small history of methodologies related to Ockham's Razor, least action and least motion, follows. This is all done in the context of the chemical (and scientific) community's almost unthinking acceptance of the principle as heuristically (...) valuable. Which is not matched, to put it mildly, by current philosophical attitudes toward Ockham's Razor. What ensues is a dialogue, pro and con. We first present a context for questioning, within chemistry, the fundamental assumption that underlies Ockham's Razor, namely that the world is simple. Then we argue that in more than one pragmatic way the Razor proves useful, without at all assuming a simple world. Ockham's Razor is an instruction in an operating manual, not a world view. Continuing the argument, we look at the multiplicity and continuity of concerted reaction mechanisms, and at principal component and Bayesian analysis (two ways in which Ockham's Razor is embedded into modern statistics). The dangers to the chemical imagination from a rigid adherence to an Ockham's Razor perspective, and the benefits of the use of this venerable and practical principle are given, we hope, their due. (shrink)

What is the minimal algebraic structure to reason about information flow? Do we really need the full power of Boolean algebras with co-closure and de Morgan dual operators? How much can we weaken and still be able to reason about multi-agent scenarios in a tidy compositional way? This paper provides some answers.

I argue that although Ockham’s Razor (OR) has its origins in a-priorist ontological mandates according to the purposes of natural theology and natural philosophy as influenced by it, the principle has taken on significant empirical and contingent materialist connotations and conceptual content since the scientific revolution. I briefly discuss the pluralism of the concept of OR historically and in contemporary science and philosophy. I then attempt to align scientific metaphysics with contemporary conceptions of OR, and to demonstrate that ontic (...) parsimony is an indispensable element of scientific (contingent and anti-a-priorist) metaphysics. I then further deploy that scientific metaphysics to propose a contingently grounded semi-formal approach, with set theoretic features, and then with information theoretic features, to provide a way of assessing when a scientific theory and its ontology are aligned with OR appropriately in the context of the proposed scientific metaphysics. (shrink)

in Handbook of the Philosophy of Information, J. van Behthem and P. Adriaans, eds., to appear.

It is sometimes claimed that the Bayesian framework automatically implements Ockham’s razor—that conditionalizing on data consistent with both a simple theory and a complex theory more or less inevitably favours the simpler theory. It is shown here that the automatic razor doesn’t in fact cut it for certain mundane curve-fitting problems.

In this paper it is argued that The Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles can be justified as a concrete application of Ockham’s Razor, the maxim which enjoins us not to multiply entities beyond necessity. First, a statement of the Principle is presented, according to which the Principle, while interesting enough, is not logically necessary. It is then argued that the assumption of the falsity of the Principle prescribes an epistemological situation where it seems to be impossible to find (...) grounds for thinking that the Principle is indeed false. Hence it is to be accepted as an epistemological necessity of sorts, one that recommended by the desire not to multiply entities beyond need. (shrink)

Ockham’s own formulations of his Razor state that one should only include a given entity in one’s ontology when one has either sensory evidence, demonstrative argument, or theological authority in favor of it. But how does Ockham decide which theological claims to treat as data for theory construction? Here I show how over time (perhaps in no small part due to pressure and attention from ecclesiastical censors) Ockham refined and changed the way he formulated his Razor, particularly the (...) “authority clause” that states that authoritative theological pronouncements constitute a reason for postulating entities in one’s ontology. This refinement proceeded across three stages, culminating in the political writings of the final period of his life, in which Ockham offers reasons (not previously mentioned in scholarly discussions of Ockham’s Razor) against granting ecclesial authority any significant role to play in settling ontological questions. (shrink)

Theoretical Computer Science, 383: 270-289, 2007.

Confusion remains about the concept “nursing science.” Definitions vary, depending on country, context and setting. Even among nurse scholars and scientists there is disagreement about the content and boundaries of nursing science. There is an urgent need for an acceptable definition that can guide nursing knowledge development, education, and practice. In this article, we highlight the problems for the profession of this sort of conceptual ambiguity, arguing that it is an ethical responsibility for the profession to gain clarity about the (...) meaning and apt focus of our knowledge development initiatives. We parse out nursing and science as separate concepts and synthesize from this analysis a simple yet comprehensive definition of nursing science. We propose that this definition is capable of unifying ongoing nursing endeavors and should serve as the basis for evaluating nursing's knowledge development and educational initiatives. (shrink)

Mind Association 2017Elliott Sober’s first book, Simplicity, defends the view that the simplicity of a theory or hypothesis is a measure of its informativeness – roughly, simpler theories require less new information to be added to them to answer relevant questions of interest. While this measure of simplicity is question-relative, it is still what you might call a global view of simplicity – simplicity means the same thing across different scientific problems and it is always an epistemic virtue. Ockham’s (...) class='Hi'>Razor is just good scientific reasoning. Sober’s 1988 book Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony, Evolution, and Inference argues against this global conception of simplicity and replaces it with a local one. Here, in one context parsimony means one thing while in another context it may mean something different. Similarly, whether the more parsimonious hypothesis is to be preferred is also a local matter; it... (shrink)

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution characterized all life as engaged in a “struggle for existence”. To struggle requires internal data processing to detect and interpret patterns to guide behavior, a mechanism to struggle for existence. The cognitive bootstrapping A-PR cycle (Autonomy | Pattern Recognition) couples the origin of life and mind, enabling their symbiotic co-evolution. Life processes energy to create order. Mind processes data to create meaning. Life and mind co-evolve toward increased functional effectiveness, using A-PR feedback cycles that reflect (...) the two Laws deduced from Ockham’s Razor. The Law of Parsimony is only one of two laws that have emerged from debate about Ockham’s Razor. Less well known is the “other edge of Ockham’s Razor”, the Law of Succinctness which, when viewed through the lens of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, enables the A-PR Hypothesis to fulfill the criteria of Ockham’s Razor. (shrink)

Nelson Goodman's new riddle of induction forcefully illustrates a challenge that must be confronted by any adequate theory of inductive inference: provide some basis for choosing among alternative hypotheses that fit past data but make divergent predictions. One response to this challenge is to distinguish among alternatives by means of some epistemically significant characteristic beyond fit with the data. Statistical learning theory takes this approach by showing how a concept similar to Popper's notion of degrees of testability is linked to (...) minimizing expected predictive error. In contrast, formal learning theory appeals to Ockham's razor, which it justifies by reference to the goal of enhancing efficient convergence to the truth. In this essay, I show that, despite their differences, statistical and formal learning theory yield precisely the same result for a class of inductive problems that I call strongly VC ordered, of which Goodman's riddle is just one example. (shrink)

In this article, the author describes his sense of synchronicity with Edgar Morin's concepts of complexity. Although Morin only briefly addresses Gaia per se, the implications of Morin's work may reveal the Gaia concept as an element of the general breakthroughs of complexity science. Morin demonstrates a phase transition that is gaining momentum right now, whereby the new, more benign science is overwhelming the old Cartesian world.

In Ockham's Razors: A User's Guide, Elliott Sober argues that parsimony considerations are epistemically relevant on the grounds that certain methods of model selection, such as the Akaike Information Criterion, exhibit good asymptotic behaviour and take the number of adjustable parameters in a model into account. I raise some worries about this form of argument.

This paper discusses Kevin Kelly’s recent attempt to justify Ockham’s Razor in terms of truth-finding efficiency. It is argued that Kelly’s justification fails to warrant confidence in the empirical content of theories recommended by Ockham’s Razor. This is a significant problem if, as Kelly and many others believe, considerations of simplicity play a pervasive role in scientific reasoning, underlying even our best tested theories, for the proposal will fail to warrant the use of these theories in practical prediction.

I propose that empirical procedures, like computational procedures, are justified in terms of truth-finding efficiency. I contrast the idea with more standard philosophies of science and illustrate it by deriving Ockham's razor from the aim of minimizing dramatic changes of opinion en route to the truth.

In discussions about the existence of God, it is sometimes claimed that the progress of science has removed the need for God. This paper uses a Bayesian analysis of Ockham’s razor to formulate and evaluate this argument, which is referred to as the science explains away God argument. Four different strategies for responding to this argument are presented and evaluated. It is argued that one of these strategies highlights how difficult it is to show that the conditions for applying (...) Ockham’s razor are satisfied and hence why SEAGA is very unlikely to succeed. (shrink)

Scientific progress is achieved not only by continuous accumulation of knowledge but also by paradigm shifts. These shifts are often necessitated by anomalous findings that cannot be incorporated in accepted models. Two important methodological principles regulate this process and complement each other: Ockham's Razor as the principle of parsimony and Plato's Life Boat as the principle of the necessity to 'save the appearances' and thus incorporate conflicting phenomenological data into theories. We review empirical data which are in conflict (...) with some presuppositions of accepted mainstream science: Clinical and experimental effects of prayer and healing intention, data from telepathy, psychokinesis experiments and precognition, and anecdotal reports of macro-psychokinesis. Taken together, the now well documented possibility of these events suggests that such phenomena are anomalies that challenge some widely held beliefs in mainstream science. On the other hand, scientists often fear that by accepting the reality of these phenomena they also have to subscribe to world-models invoking ontological dualism or idealism. We suggest accepting the phenomena as real, but without questionable ontologies commonly associated with them. We outline how this might work. (shrink)

There is a broad consensus about the fundamental role of thehippocampal system (hippocampus and its adjacent areas) in theencoding and retrieval of episodic memories. This paper presents afunctional model of this system. Although memory is not asingle-unit cognitive function, we took the view that the wholesystem of the smooth, interrelated memory processes may have acommon basis. That is why we follow the Ockham's razor principleand minimize the size or complexity of our model assumption set.The fundamental assumption is the (...) requirement of solving the socalled ``homunculus fallacy'', which addresses the issue ofinterpreting the input. Generative autoassociators seem to offer aresolution of the paradox. Learning to represent and to recallinformation, in these generative networks, imply maximization ofinformation transfer, sparse representation and noveltyrecognition. A connectionist architecture, which integrates theseaspects as model constraints, is derived. Numerical studiesdemonstrate the novelty recognition and noise filtering propertiesof the architecture. Finally, we conclude that the derivedconnectionist architecture can be related to the neurobiologicalsubstrate. (shrink)

A finite data set is consistent with infinitely many alternative theories. Scientific realists recommend that we prefer the simplest one. Anti-realists ask how a fixed simplicity bias could track the truth when the truth might be complex. It is no solution to impose a prior probability distribution biased toward simplicity, for such a distribution merely embodies the bias at issue without explaining its efficacy. In this note, I argue, on the basis of computational learning theory, that a fixed simplicity bias (...) is necessary if inquiry is to converge to the right answer efficiently, whatever the right answer might be. Efficiency is understood in the sense of minimizing the least fixed bound on retractions or errors prior to convergence. (shrink)