William ockham book blogger license#

Another great resource is the Skeptic's Dictionary. But the book market seemed to me to be an asymmetric information situation. If you are interested in detailed background on this principle you can check out its Wikipedia entry. The simpler the explanation the more likely it is better than a complex one.įor us in the Decision Making field my recommendation is that to truly understand complex sets of data we should apply the Occam's Razor 'smell test'. Predestination, God's Foreknowledge, and Future Contingents.

William ockham book blogger license#

I am sure I am taking my own poetic license in understanding the principle and internalizing it but Occam's Razor is always at the back of my mind because it reminds me that often we need to simplify our thinking. Five Texts on the Mediaeval Problem of Universals: Porphyry, Boethius, Abelard, Duns Scotus, Ockham. Yet in almost every case the reason for sub optimal outcomes is the complexity that we insert into the analysis from our thinking (assumptions, hypotheses). William of Ockham was a theological voluntarist who believed that if God had wanted to, he could have become incarnate as a donkey or an ox, or even as both a donkey and a man at the same time. In other words, we are justified in positing only such causes as are necessary to explain the phenomenon in question. It states, Do not multiply causes beyond necessity. The last of the Franciscans and the last of the scholastics was William of Ockham(1300-47) who could also be regarded as an original mind in that he embraced scientific knowledge and logic at the expense of metaphysics. from Cornell University in 2014, where he wrote a dissertation on a theory of the proposition developed by Walter Burley (a contemporary of and philosophical antagonist to William Ockham). The reason that Occam's Razor connects with me so deeply is that we all live in an increasingly complex world where we all try to complicate things way too much in trying to understand event/activities/outcomes/happenings, or in our case web data. Subjects Trending Library Explorer Lists. Ockham’s Razor (named for the great medieval theologian William Ockham 1287-1347) is a principle governing inference to the best explanation. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Colgate University who earned his Ph.D. Plurality should not be posited without necessity Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate The principle is often expressed in Latin as:Įntia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem,Įntities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.Īn alternative way of stating this principle is: One book at the top of (way too big) to-read list is From Teilhard to Omega, a compilation of essays Teilhard de Chardin. Occam's razor (also spelled Ockham's razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham (ca.