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Old 03-07-2010, 06:58 PM   #60
toot
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Join Date: Apr 2009
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Quote:
Originally Posted by flmason View Post
Why do people say this silly line from a movie? Is it because it has the word "razor" in it? LOL!

Occam's Razor is at best a suggestion of causes not a law. Geez, computer software defects prove time and again, sometimes the simplest apparent causes are not the real ones, LOL!

"the scientific method, Occam's razor is not considered an irrefutable principle of logic, and certainly not a scientific result.[6][7][8][9]"

[6] Philosophy of Chemistry, Vol. 3, pp. 3-28, (1997).
[7] ^ a b c Alan Baker, Simplicity, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (2004) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/simplicity/
[8] ^ a b c d e f g Courtney A, Courtney M: Comments Regarding "On the Nature Of Science", Physics in Canada, Vol. 64, No. 3 (2008), p7-8.
# ^ a b c d e f Dieter Gernert, Ockham's Razor and Its Improper Use, Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 135-140, (2007).
[9] ^ a b c d Elliott Sober, Let’s Razor Occam’s Razor, p. 73-93, from Dudley Knowles (ed.) Explanation and Its Limits, Cambridge University Press (1994).
occam's razor is an heuristic - 'the simplest correct solution is the best one' the wikipedia article is pretty good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

but the thing to keep in mind is that Occam's razor is used to choose between competing correct accounts, not just competing accounts and is a kind of measure of utility rather than correctness(because it assumes equivalent correctness amongst the competing accounts)
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