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Okham's Razor (Sharon Kaye, 01/06/2003, Think)

Ockham?s Razor is one of the most important epistemic principles. It states that if you have to choose from some number of competing theories, choose the simplest theory because it is most likely to be true.

Suppose, for example, that the newspaper, which is delivered daily to your doorstep, is missing this morning. There are a number of possible explanations. The delivery person could be ill, the newspaper plant may have shut down, or outer space aliens may have stolen it for the purpose of spying on Earthlings. The obvious choice among these three possibilities is the first. The second and third choices seem increasingly unacceptable. But why? If the choice is mine, what is there to prevent me from accepting the alien theory?

The answer is that the alien theory is too complicated. The illness theory requires me to believe in the presence of a virus, something I already believe in for other reasons. The alien theory, in contrast, requires me to believe in something that I have no other reason to acknowledge. This is to say that the alien theory asks me to adopt more assumptions than does the illness theory.

One might still wonder why added assumptions constitute a problem. After all, it is not as though we are short on brain space. In fact, neuroscientists believe that vast portions of our brains go entirely unused during our lives. My interest in creativity and originality might lead me to take pride in developing a more complicated theory.

But this would be a mistake. Complication is not something to take pride in because it necessarily increases the risk of error. Each and every belief is a liability insofar as it carries the possibility that it may not be true. The more assumptions you adopt, therefore, the more likely it is that you have unknowingly committed yourself to a falsehood. Falsehood is the great enemy of intelligence. To live intelligently, we must minimize the risk of error as much as we can.

Such is our faith anyway. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 10, 2003 12:52 PM