Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: AmishDude

Hey, I have a B.S. in Zoology and it wasn't a soft science (then - UCLA Class 1969).

They taught me a great tool which these fools have either never learned or forgotten.

Occam's Razor.

Occam's razor (also spelled Ockham's razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham (Guilhelmi Ockam and Guillermi de ockam in Latin [1]). Originally a tenet of the reductionist philosophy of nominalism, it is more often taken today as a heuristic maxim that advises economy, parsimony, or simplicity in scientific theories.

Occam's razor states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating, or "shaving off", those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae (law of succinctness):

entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem,

which translates to:

entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_Razor


84 posted on 08/30/2006 12:51:02 PM PDT by tomswiftjr (Remember Pearl Harbor)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 69 | View Replies ]


To: tomswiftjr
"They taught me a great tool which these fools have either never learned or forgotten: Occam's Razor."

Conspiricists prefer Ockham's Minoxydil: the more complicated a scenario is, the more likely it happened.
98 posted on 08/30/2006 3:15:25 PM PDT by decal (The Key To Flexibility is Indecision)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 84 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson