Abstract
I argue that although Ockham’s Razor (OR) has its origins in a-priorist ontological mandates according to the purposes of natural theology and natural philosophy as influenced by it, the principle has taken on significant empirical and contingent materialist connotations and conceptual content since the scientific revolution. I briefly discuss the pluralism of the concept of OR historically and in contemporary science and philosophy. I then attempt to align scientific metaphysics with contemporary conceptions of OR, and to demonstrate that ontic parsimony is an indispensable element of scientific (contingent and anti-a-priorist) metaphysics. I then further deploy that scientific metaphysics to propose a contingently grounded semi-formal approach, with set theoretic features, and then with information theoretic features, to provide a way of assessing when a scientific theory and its ontology are aligned with OR appropriately in the context of the proposed scientific metaphysics.
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Notes
Think of the I as denoting ‘Independent’ for convenience (in fact I intend a reference to information sources).
See also (Floridi, 2008, p. 224).
French’s Viking approach involves.
French formulates a version of OSR that emphasises the modal nature of ontic structure, and according to which we should determine the mind independent natural world by “tak[ing] our best current scientific theories…read off the relevant features of those theories…Those which are responsible for the empirical success, that feature in the relevant explanations…take those features to stand in the appropriate relationship to aspects of the (mind-independent) world” (French 2014, p. 1). However, the modal properties read off from the theories.
Artefactual representations are generally purposed. The arbitrariness referred to is about the number of different kinds of representations that will serve to represent.
Kim, Lasserre, and Wang 2013.
Bosonic string theory.
Whether or not this arguably rather a priori ‘elegance requirement’ is what is needed perhaps remains to be ratified, and adequate grist for a separate paper. Maybe the structure of things is such that the demand for such elegance will turn out to be a foil to progress. Are we convinced of the Cartesian expectation that the universe will be mathematically neat and elegant?.
This is certainly required by Berkley’s idealism, and is also allowed by Kantian (and, to some extent, Peircian) transcendental idealism, and by the kind of participatory cosmology adhered to by David Wallace. However, since I am interested in a scientific realist and scientific metaphysics, because that approach is still the mainstay of practicing scientists, I won’t countenance the possibility that human cognitive and doxastic states and posits and hypotheses made by human beings could actually cause neutrinos to come to exist in the universe where previously they did not I-obtain.
From here I’ll use the \(s_{j}\) notation for simplicity and due to the informational analysis and its source based ontology.
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Long, B. A Scientific Metaphysics and Ockham’s Razor. Axiomathes 29, 483–513 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-019-09430-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-019-09430-5