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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Edwarda who wrote (34978)	4/16/1999 10:05:00 AM
From: Chuzzlewit	Respond to of 108807

Edwarda, We shall have to debate this issue in further detail. Certainly it is a tool, but, unless my understanding is sadly mistaken, the premise is that you start with two two or more hypotheses that completely explain all of the available data and use the Razor to identify the parsimonious working hypothesis -- not the truth. That is not the case with the example you provided because the orbits of planets could not have been circular given all that was known at the time. You are quite correct in pointing out that it is a tool, not a world view. But it is a tool used in distinguishing between two or more otherwise equally predictive theories for the purpose of identifying the best working hypothesis (not the truth). The operant phrases are equally predictive and working hypothesis. For example, fifty years ago there were hypotheses around that posited that the genetic code was an overlapping series of four letters (nucleotides). Based upon what was then known, one could construct any number of coding mechanisms that could potentially explain the data available at the time. However, the added complexity required of such a coding systems lead most investigators to shelve that view. Point mutation studies ultimately rendered the overlapping coding system untenable. The natural progression of science is from the simple to the more complex, and use of Ockham's razor is just a philosophical heuristic designed to identify the best working hypothesis, not the truth. TTFN, CTC

To: Edwarda who wrote (34978)	4/16/1999 10:37:00 AM
From: nihil	Respond to of 108807

I disagree. An elipse is much simpler and less specialized than a circle which is mere a special case of an elipse in which both radii are the same. When a mathematician proves a theorem for a reduced case with fewer variables or parameters he next tries to generalized to a more flexible form. The choice between the circle and elipse is never to be resolved in favor of the circle. Ockham said "entities should not be increased beyond necessity" but clearly circles had to be so multiplied if they were to approximate the measured courses of the planets. The elipse is a superior hypothesis even if it were more complex (which it is not). The problem, of course, was that circles did not explain the position of a planet even if you used a lot of them in the form of epicycles (wheels on wheels! Big wheel turned by faith, little wheel turned by the Grace of God. Wheel in a wheel. Way in the middle of the air. ). It was lots of circles against one elipse for each planet, obviously a much simpler solution that tickled Kepler (who drove a dagger into the last epicycle used by Copernicus) and no doubt would have pleased William of Ockham as well -- a wonderful philosopher who drove the nominalist stake through the stinking corpse of Plato's universals.

To: Edwarda who wrote (34978)	4/16/1999 12:56:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to 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.