Ockham's Razors

Sober, E. (2015). Ockham's Razors: A User's Manual. Cambridge University Press.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

2015

DOI

10.1017/cbo9781107705937

ISBN

9781107692534

DOI registrant

Cambridge University Press

Link

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107705937

Cited from

art_aesthetics, philosophy

Cited by

4 citations across 4 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Minimal Modification Principle
  • Minimal Modification Principle is about minimal modification in a specific reasoning context: when imagining counterfactual alternatives, change as little as possible about the actual world, a distinction Sober (2015) clarifies in his treatment of how parsimony principles function differently across theory choice and evidence assessment.

    This sourceProbabilistic and likelihoodist analysis of parsimony principles in theory choice; distinguishes Ockham's Razor (preference for simpler theories) from other parsimony heuristics, clarifying why theory-choice parsimony differs from minimal-modification constraints on counterfactual scenarios.

• Minimalism
  • The same logic underlies the philosophical principle of parsimony — Sober (2015) traces Ockham's razor as the rule that, between rival explanations, the one positing fewer entities is preferable, structurally identical to minimalist reduction in design.
• Parsimony (Occam's Razor)
  • Sober

Mechanisms

• Occam-Style Model Selection
  • As a cheap tie-breaker among adequacy-equivalent candidates, it is the standing corrective that Occam's razor names.

    This sourcePresents Occam’s razor as a low-cost simplicity tie-breaker among empirically adequate alternatives.

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