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Single Idea 21267
[filed under theme 2. Reason / B. Laws of Thought / 6. Ockham's Razor
]
Full Idea
It is superfluous to suppose that what can be accounted for by a few principles has been produced by many.
Gist of Idea
Supposing many principles is superfluous if a few will do it
Source
Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologicae [1265], Ia,Q02,Art3,Ob2)
Book Ref
'The Existence of God', ed/tr. Hick,John [Macmillan 1964], p.82
A Reaction
Notice that this is 'superfluous' rather than 'wrong'. But ten people can lift a piano which could have been lifted by eight. Note that this is 150 years before Ockham.
The
27 ideas
with the same theme
['Do not multiply entities beyond necessity']:
21267
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Supposing many principles is superfluous if a few will do it
[Aquinas]
|
16676
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Why use more things when fewer will do?
[William of Ockham]
|
6806
|
Do not multiply entities beyond necessity
[William of Ockham]
|
19342
|
Reason avoids multiplying hypotheses or principles
[Leibniz]
|
4541
|
Everything simple is merely imaginary
[Nietzsche]
|
22644
|
Our greatest pleasure is the economy of reducing chaotic facts to one single fact
[James]
|
6106
|
Reducing entities and premisses makes error less likely
[Russell]
|
2939
|
If a sign is useless it is meaningless; that is the point of Ockham's maxim
[Wittgenstein]
|
22431
|
Good algorithms and theories need many occurrences of just a few elements
[Quine]
|
8207
|
The quest for simplicity drove scientists to posit new entities, such as molecules in gases
[Quine]
|
8208
|
In arithmetic, ratios, negatives, irrationals and imaginaries were created in order to generalise
[Quine]
|
4036
|
What matters is not how many entities we postulate, but how many kinds of entities
[Armstrong, by Mellor/Oliver]
|
3426
|
If one theory is reduced to another, we make fewer independent assumptions about the world
[Kim]
|
21021
|
Keep premises as weak as possible, to avoid controversial difficulties
[Nussbaum]
|
15784
|
The Razor seems irrelevant for Meinongians, who allow absolutely everything to exist
[Lycan]
|
15787
|
Maybe Ockham's Razor is a purely aesthetic principle
[Lycan]
|
10471
|
Ockham's Razor has more content if it says believe only in what is causal
[Oliver]
|
7037
|
Parsimony does not imply the world is simple, but that our theories should try to be
[Heil]
|
7038
|
A theory with few fundamental principles might still posit a lot of entities
[Heil]
|
8964
|
Entities can be multiplied either by excessive categories, or excessive entities within a category
[Hoffman/Rosenkrantz]
|
4037
|
Ockham's Razor is the principle that we need reasons to believe in entities
[Mellor/Oliver]
|
4217
|
It is more extravagant, in general, to revise one's logic than to augment one's ontology
[Lowe]
|
4456
|
Epistemological Ockham's Razor demands good reasons, but the ontological version says reality is simple
[Moreland]
|
16244
|
If the universe is profligate, the Razor leads us astray
[Maudlin]
|
16255
|
The Razor rightly prefers one cause of multiple events to coincidences of causes
[Maudlin]
|
13743
|
We should not multiply basic entities, but we can have as many derivative entities as we like
[Schaffer,J]
|
16677
|
Anti-Razor: if you can't account for a truth, keep positing things until you can
[Pasnau]
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