Everybody talks about Occam, nobody does anything about him

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We have often seen here and not only here a lot of Little Red Book flourishing of the Sacred Razor [which reminds me of a story which truly shocked my sensitive young linguist's mind, but that is not relevant here]. Occam's Razor, that is, parsimony and all that.

Very often appealed to with the assumption that the simpler story is more likely to be true.

Which is, however, false - the simplest scenario is only one of a large [I try to avoid saying infinite] ways of producing a given result, and is actually rather low of probability.

Occam's Razor is very useful in the classroom or anywhere else people are theorizing with insufficient data - helps to restrain the higher flights of fancy. It is very useful in, for example, electronics as the Black Box principle, where you try to calculate a circuit that will operate like the unknown components powering the cloking device. You want to duplicate the effect, not the chips, and the simpler the better - you patent it and produce cloaking devices made in Taiwan at half the price.

Of course, if you do not believe there is a TRUTH out there - and many claim they do not - Occam is very serviceable. One linguistic analysis says "Get out of here" is "really" saying "I want you to get out of here" Which can be said to be "really" "I say that I want you to get out of here". Which can be seen as "I assert that I am saying that I desire to see the back of you" - and so on and on and on and on and on ...

THIS is where we need Occam to blow the whistle [built into the handle of the razor] shout "FOUL" and pull the plug on the infinite loop.

But otherwise - well, at one point before advances in astronomical technology and gravitational theory, Occam's parsimony would compel us [if we trusted parsimony, which thank God I do not] to agree the simplest and therefore most correct formulation says the sun circles the earth.

Occam's Razor states: 'do not multiply causes unnecessarily'. One is only really justified in violating Occam's Razor when it provides explanatory scope or power.

I heard Occam was a big fan of shaving.

The idea is not to have any more causal agents than are required for an explanation. If the thing to be explained is really and truly complicated than complicated theories or hypotheses are required for an explanation.

ruveyn

Chaos theory.

Ditto what revuyn and 91 said.

The solar system is a good example.

At first glance it does appear the sun goes around the earth so it would indeed be simple to say that thats exactly whats happening- the sun orbits the earth.

But the problem is the rest of the planets in the zodiac.
If your a medeaval astronomer plotting the paths of the planets based on the "simple" assumption that the earth is the center of the solar system itin fact gets quite compicated.

The Earth and Mars (for example) over take each like cars on seperated race tracks, but viewed from a stationary earth pov mars appears to move back and forth across the sky in repeated predictable but extremely complicated ways
You end up with planets moving in epicycles,and double and triple epicycles. (circles within circles).

The medeaval schemes to keep track of all that got extremely complicated.

One day Copernicus was playing around with his star maps and decided for the heck of it to see what the solar system would look like if it were sun-centered.

He swapped the earth for the sun at the center of the known cosmos, and proceded to see what kind of paths the planets would have to follow to move the way they appear to move in the sky.

Low and behold it got simpler: all the planets (including earth) fell into nice elliptical orbits around the sun without any crazy epicycling philigree. So the geocentric theory won out precisely because it was in fact the simpler theory that eliminated the unnecessary complexity of the earth-centered model.
So it fits into occam's razor rather than violating it.

This interpretation, however, is missing the spirit in which Occam's Razor is usually applied. I think Isaac Newton's definition of Occam's Razor is the most apt to explain why. Newton phrased it thus:



In other words, Occam's Razor is not just the favoring of simplicity. There is another criterion involved, which is whether the hypothesis in question adequately explains the phenomenon being tested. Science is all about testing and disproving hypotheses-- if a theory is eventually found to be inconsistent or insufficient to explain the data collected, it will be thrown out or revised, no matter how simple and elegant it is. Occam's Razor is not about favoring a simple but inconsistent answer over a more complex and more accurate one. It's about not overcomplicating things from the beginning, and starting from a foundation of simplicity, so that the process of discovery is additive rather than subtractive.

So true - and if we use Occam a la Newton for example, very fine

If we say, postulating a new cause lets us get two understandings for the price of one and dump those epicycles [though they were fun]. I'm good with it, Occam is good with it.

Here is the thing, though: first you have to let planetary movements into your workspace.

Has anybody else ever noticed how people working in sciences and pseudosciences [you got your list, I got my list, let's stay friends and not compare lists] Do like the party bigwigs?

The party pundits say: do not support or vote for a candidate unless you think he has a chance of winning. [Probably why I have never been nominated] Similarly, the science guys act on the usually not clearly enunciated principle so beloved of lawyers: don't ask the question if you do not know the answer.

Yes, the physicists seek the Grail of Everything - I respect them for it and wish them good luck. But then if you read them some are pretty sure it is just around the corner. I know that in my own field of Linguistics there are a lot of questions we don't ask.

I have heard it said that the Egyptian physician would say "This is an ailment which I will treat"-If the illness was certainly curable. OR "This is an ailment with which I will contend"-If the outcome was doubtful. OR "This is an ailment not to be treated" - sorry guys, out of my league.

A lot of science does the same thing, sticking mostly to the easy questions.

And if you have not seen certain things, a firm materialist stance and an appeal to parsimony when called for keeps the playing ground level.

Well -you do whats doable. You dont attempt to do what isnt doable. The wright brothers didnt jump off skyscrapers flapping their arms to try to fly. I dont fault them for that!

Razor's edge topic

Always a close shave with Occam. Willy nilly. He must have led a simple life, that of a religious recluse. I agree with his minimalist approach, though I like to study details, and come to my own conclusions.

While that assumption makes "sunrise" and "sunset" a simple thing it complicates the motion of the planets. If one attends to the orbits of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn (the large planets observable without telescopes) one notices retrograde orbital motions. At this point the geocentric theory shows its dark side. To account for the observable retrograde motions it necessary to postulate epicycles and deferents. At which point an account of the motion of the planets becomes very cluttered. Over 50 epicylces were required to get even a rough correspondence between the model and what was observed.

Copernicus did not do much better. Even his heliocentric theory needed epicycles because he assumed uniform velocities in circular orbits. The thing did not clear up until Kepler postulated a system based on elliptical orbits obeying 3 simple laws. Unfortunately there was no physical account of why these laws held until Newton came up with a force-based theory and the law of gravitation.

ruveyn