Concept
Occam's razor
Overview
In philosophy, Occam's razor (also spelled Ockham's razor or Ocham's razor; Latin: novacula Occami) is the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements. It is also known as the principle of parsimony or the law of parsimony (Latin: lex parsimoniae). Attributed to William of Ockham, a 14th-century English philosopher and theologian, it is frequently cited as Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, which translates as "Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity", although Occam never used those exact words. Popularly, the principle is sometimes paraphrased as "of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred".
The philosophical razor advocates that when presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction and both hypotheses have equal explanatory power, one should prefer the hypothesis that requires the fewest assumptions, and that this is not meant to be a way of choosing between hypotheses that make different predictions. Similarly, in science, Occam's razor is used as an abductive heuristic in the development of theoretical models rather than as a rigorous arbiter between candidate models.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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But all philosophy is either cognition on the basis of pure reason, or the cognition of reason on the basis of empirical principles. The former is termed pure, the latter empirical philosophy. The philosophy of pure reason is either propædeutic, that is, an inquiry into the powers of reason in regard to pure à priori cognition, and is termed critical philosophy; or it is, secondly, the system of pure reason—a…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
States what Occam's razor is; the author is tied to Occam's razor in the knowledge graph.
Such propositions as the above are trivial, and would never be enunciated in real life except by an orator preparing the way for a piece of sophistry. They are called 'analytic' because the predicate is obtained by merely analysing the subject. Before the time of Kant it was thought that all judgements of which we could be certain _a priori_ were of this kind: that in all of them there was a predicate which was only…
Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
States what Occam's razor is; the author is tied to Occam's razor in the knowledge graph.
144. But, nothing seems more to have contributed towards engaging men in controversies and mistakes with regard to the nature and operations of the mind, than the being used to speak of those things in terms borrowed from sensible ideas. For example, the will is termed the motion of the soul; this infuses a belief that the mind of man is as a ball in motion, impelled and determined by the objects of sense, as…
George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
States what Occam's razor is; the author is tied to Occam's razor in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Occam's razor
- George Berkeley
- Thomas Kuhn
- Elliott Sober
- Lewis White Beck
- David Lewis (philosopher)
- John Punch (theologian)
Related ideas
- De revolutionibus orbium coelestium
- Faith
- Falsifiability
- Principle of sufficient reason
- Artificial intelligence
- George Berkeley
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Philosophy
- Leap of faith
- Isaac Newton
- Immanuel Kant
- Punishment
- Phylogenetic tree
- Karl Menger
- Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory
- Atheism
- Jorge Luis Borges
- Karl Popper
- Underdetermination
- Posterior Analytics
- Mind–body dualism
- Materialism
- Maimonides
- Pierre Louis Maupertuis
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Atheism.