This is an interesting point and provokes two questions for me:
Is there such a thing as truth, and if yes, how will we know that we’ve finally found it if science doesn’t reveal it?
If science is simply our most accurate description of what we’ve figured out so far, what proportion of what there is to figure out, have we actually figured out to date?
That reminds me of the US Patent Registrar in the 1900s, who advocated the closure of his office because there were no more worthwhile inventions to be invented.
Isn’t both science and truth limitless?
**This is what I’m asking, I suppose; it seems to be a philosophical question that has been debated for thousands of years; I won’t hold my breath waiting for a definitive answer.
it’s easy to work out how much you know as a percentage of all the things that there are to know, you calculate it like this:
([total of things there are to know]/[things that you know])*100
the tricky bit is working out the first parameter, because you don’t know what you don’t know.
sorry, got that formula wrong, should be:
([things that you know]/[total of things there are to know])*100
That’s an important difference - don’t want to get the wrong answer 
Well, there are things that I know I don’t know and things that I don’t know that I don’t know.
Add together everything that we all know. Pile that up in the current ‘science’ pile.
Compare it to the pile of ‘everything that we don’t know that we don’t know’.
Which pile is the bigger? There’s something to ponder on.
Occam’s Razor does not conflict with Chaos Theory. Unpredictable (in the sense of arbitrarily precision) perturbations are a phenomenological observation. Occam’s Razor says nothing about the characteristics of ovbserved phenomena.
I remember reading in a B-grade (or C-grade) creationism book that Occam’s Razor actually proves creationism because the simplest explanation for the descent of man is, “God did it.” Made me chuckle.
Perhaps a way to rephrase Occam’s Razor would be to say, “The theory with the fewest amount of assumptions is probably the correct one.”
It would be fairer to say the English translation of the pseudocode below:
procedure OccamsRazor(SetofTheories(S))
Theory x = FindTheoryWithMinimalAssumptions(S)
while (NoReasonToReject(x))
Use(x)
OccamsRazor(S - {x})
(Forgive me; I’ve been coding all day and English is seeming more and more like a second language at this point.)
I remember reading in a B-grade (or C-grade) creationism book that Occam’s Razor actually proves creationism because the simplest explanation for the descent of man is, “God did it.” Made me chuckle.
Perhaps a way to rephrase Occam’s Razor would be to say, “The theory with the fewest amount of assumptions is probably the correct one.”
The best wording for Occam’s razor that I’ve encountered is "do not complicate needlessly."
The more common “the simplest explanation is the right one” tends to make people uneasy as it’s harder to justify. I’d be happy to see that phrasing disappear altogether.
AHunter3 said: “only if the person wielding the blade is willing to continue considering the more complicated explanation long enough to examine them fairly.”
To construct an explanation, you have to have something that needs explaining. If you have an explanation that fits all the observations, then don’t complicate needlessly.
If you have new observations which don’t fit your explanation (such as planets apparently moving in epicycles and big pendulums changing their plane of swing), then there is a need for a more complicated explanation. Occam’s razor actually demands a more complicated explanation because the simpler one is insufficient.
Your point about the 5th century peasant not actually accepting the new observations is valid, but it doesn’t demonstrate that Occam’s razor is bad practice - it demonstrates that ignoring evidence is bad practice.
Walor asked:
*1. Is there such a thing as truth, and if yes, how will we know that we’ve finally found it if science doesn’t reveal it?
Question 1 is getting into the realms of philosophy, and I wish Libertarian was still posting as he loved that stuff. Personally I use an analogy with maps - “truth” is how well your map fits the territory.
If you’re building bridges, dams and roller coasters, then you can treat gravity as being a constant acceleration of 9.81 m/s/s, and that’s “true” enough to keep the bridges and dams from falling down.
If you’re putting satellites into Earth orbit, you can treat gravity as obeying an inverse square law, and that’s “true” enough to send TV pictures around the world. It’s a better “map” than the one used for building bridges.
If you’re observing the gravitational lensing of light from distant stars, then you have to use Einstein’s model of gravity. It’s the best “map” we have for explaining our observations. Is it then the ultimate “truth”? I doubt it - there are already difficulties reconciling it with quantum theory, and so Occam’s razor calls for a more complicated explanation yet…
Ultimate “truth” would be a map which is a perfect model of the territory. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether such a map is possible and whether it would be useful!
This is close, but not quite, my understanding of Occam’s razor.
This is very close to my understanding. The literal translation seems to be on the lines of “do not multiply entities needlessly”.
It seems that what Occam was trying to say was “Don’t throw in new or unknown causes if known causes will explain the observations”.
In Occam’s view, any new entities introduced into your theory had to be supported in their turn, or your theory was incomplete, possibly flawed. A competing theory, even if it had more steps, or postulates, or needed more things to happen, etc, was more likely to be correct if all of the entities or causes used by the theory were known or explained in the theory. His statement of “fewer new/unknown entities” has usually been paraphrased as “simpler”, at least in recent years. But that isn’t exactly what he meant, and doesn’t work quite as well as a tool for decision-making.
So using this version of the razor, the creationist one-step “And God said, “Let there be Light” theory isn’t “simpler”, because it introduces a new and unknown entity, God. The competing theory, even though it has many more steps, looks like a better bet because it relies on existing entities and causes.
Ugly
For the record, I think old Will believed in God. He also felt that God’s nature was not able to be understood through reason, unlike Aquinas.