Occam's razor
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Occam's razor (or Ockham's razor) is the principle that "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity" (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem). The popular interpretation of this principle is that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. |
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Occam's razor (also written as Ockham's razor and in Latin lex parsimoniae) is a problem-solving principle devised by William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), who was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher and theologian. The principle states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Other, more complicated solutions may ultimately prove correct, but—in the absence of certainty—the fewer assumptions that are made, the better.
The term razor refers to distinguishing between two hypotheses either by "shaving away" unnecessary assumptions or cutting apart two similar conclusions.
See also
- Algorithmic information theory
- Bayesian inference
- Buridan's ass
- Ceteris paribus
- Common sense
- Cladistics
- Crabtree's Bludgeon
- Curve fitting
- Data compression
- Eliminative materialism
- Egyptian fractions
- Falsifiability
- Greedy reductionism
- Hanlon's razor
- Isotelism
- KISS principle
- Kolmogorov complexity
- Metaphysical naturalism
- Minimum description length
- Minimum message length
- Model selection
- Morgan's canon
- Murphy's law
- Occam programming language
- Overfitting
- Parsimony
- Philosophy of science
- Poverty of the stimulus
- Principle of least astonishment
- Rationalism
- Razor (philosophy)
- Reference class problem
- Scientific method
- Scientific reductionism
- Simplicity
- Turtles all the way down
