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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!!
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To: Edwarda who wrote (34978)4/16/1999 12:56:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte  Read Replies (1) of 108807
 
Edwarda, let me put my $.02 on Chuzz's corner of the table here.

>Moreover, the classic example of where it fails is the orbit of planets. The simplest
view would suggest a perfect circle rather than the ellipses that, in fact, do obtain.<

The simplest what view? Measured, or what your aesthetic mind wants them to be?
By the 15th century it was established by naked-eye astrometry that the planets did not move in circular orbits. That was a fact; from there on in Occam's Razor could not be invoked without all the available facts. Thus your hypothesis was already disqualified.

The epicycle business came from trying to shoehorn observed planetary motion into dictated Aristotelian cosmology. We waited for Kepler to come along, take the radical step of discarding nice neat circles and show that ellipses worked Really Well. So well that even with our wonderful astrometric equipment - the model still holds. Cool.

The deal about measurement underlines a very important sentence in Chuzzlewit's definition. >multiple, equally predictive hypotheses account for the available data.< The Razor gets laid against two or more equally predictive and fact-fitting models. A new measurement or observation that fails to fit the model chucks the model - without need to invoke the Razor. This lies outside the purview of the Razor - the business of finding and verifying facts and premises. The Razor deals only with the hypotheses that can be constructed on the back of that collection of facts - and is used to winnow the inbuilt premises we import into the models.
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