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The preference for the simplest explanation is just a heuristic, there is no compelling philosophical argument why it should hold. Philosophers of science are s

The preference for the simplest explanation is just a heuristic, there is no compelling philosophical argument why it should hold. Philosophers of science are still debating whether it is a valid heuristic; meanwhile, scientists don't invoke it all that much, I believe. They care about whether an explanation is right, not simple.

Retric 14y ago
All philosophical arguments are meaningless. Five happy Moon's sang the Macarena. Truth is beauty. There is nothing grammatically wrong with those sentences, there is no way to philosophically disprove them, and they have nothing to do with the physical world around us. PS: I am not saying philosophy is useless, just it's a search for something other than meaning... perhaps truth. ;)
- andreasvc 14y ago
  Disregarding the fact that there actually _was_ something grammatically wrong with that sentence, I think that is a misconception of philosophy. It's not supposed to prove or disprove much (except in certain areas dedicated to logic perhaps). I don't see philosophical arguments as meaningless, and to claim so is to make a very philosophical claim ... What is meaning anyway? I don't think anybody really knows the answer to that. But perhaps you meant to say that these arguments won't lead to any concrete results, and there I'd have to agree with you.
SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago
> The preference for the simplest explanation is just a heuristic. ... They care about whether an explanation is right, not simple. I disagree entirely. Given two explanations that are "right" in that they explain the observations, and one is very simple, and the other involves vast mysterious unknowns, I would say that there is a strong philosophical argument in favour of the simple explanation. Especially when complex suppositions like a "goal" of evolution have the characteristics that people are drawn to them for emotional reasons, they raise more questions than they answer.
- andreasvc 14y ago
  With "right" I meant the explanation which is actually correct. The preference for simple explanations is only a bias for lack of a better criterion to choose; but typically there are lots of more substantive reasons why one explanation is better than the other (e.g., by looking at how it ties in with other theories). The idea of simplicity is quite arbitrary. In machine learning there is an analogue in Minimum Description Length learning. It turns out that there the kind of representation is crucial; a hypothesis can be minimal under one representation, but not the other; ergo, what is "simple" is not a straightforward question, and therefore the heuristic is somewhat arbitrary. A "goal" to evolution may sound complex to you, but from an information theoretic perspective, the opposite, namely actual, complete randomness, is the most complex thing possible ... The whole point of this is: we don't really know, the best we can say is "I won't assume things I don't have evidence for." Lastly, your "raise more questions than they answer" is the hallmark of philosophical problems ...
  - beagle3 14y ago
    > With "right" I meant the explanation which is actually correct. Outside of math (and by extension, mathematical models and virtual computer systems), there is no such thing as "correct". We have physical models we tend to rely on because they give good predictions. But there's no "correct" explanation for physical phenomena. Newton's mechanics were "correct" until Schroedinger and Heisenberg showed they weren't. And I'm sure within a hundred years, we'll have an even better model than modern quantum mechanics.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago
    > Lastly, your "raise more questions than they answer" is the hallmark of philosophical problems ... Yes, and it is also a hallmark of bullshit and the content-free. The reasoning that "All X have the property Y. I have something here that is Y, therefore it must be an X" must be a classic logical fallacy, no?
  - SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago
    > With "right" I meant the explanation which is actually correct. But that's not where you started out, you started with (at least) two hypotheses that fit the facts: > I mean everything that's considered evidence of evolution could also be considered evidence of teleology Comparing right to wrong would be quite a straw man.
Dn_Ab 14y ago
Actually this topic has moved beyond philosophy. There is a beautiful and simple mathematical argument and formulation of Occams Razor in terms of the universal prior of Solomonoff induction. For more, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_inference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_inference and http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Algorithmic_probability http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Algorithmic_probability. This is another but similar concept of an incomputable strategy with optimal predictive power http://hans.math.upenn.edu/~ted/203S10/References/peculiar.pdf http://hans.math.upenn.edu/~ted/203S10/References/peculiar.p... predicated on picking the simplest explanation. In a practical setting complex theories or models with lots of explanatory variables tend to overfit the data. In machine learning, regularization or picking a proper prior and things like Minimum Description length in forming networks are instances of penalizing complexity for better predictive power. In decision trees, pruning is another example. In genetic programming picking the smaller and or faster of two similarly performing programs substantially reduces its tendency to overfit.

Retric 14y ago

All philosophical arguments are meaningless. Five happy Moon's sang the Macarena. Truth is beauty. There is nothing grammatically wrong with those sentences, there is no way to philosophically disprove them, and they have nothing to do with the physical world around us. PS: I am not saying philosophy is useless, just it's a search for something other than meaning... perhaps truth. ;)

andreasvc 14y ago
Disregarding the fact that there actually _was_ something grammatically wrong with that sentence, I think that is a misconception of philosophy. It's not supposed to prove or disprove much (except in certain areas dedicated to logic perhaps). I don't see philosophical arguments as meaningless, and to claim so is to make a very philosophical claim ... What is meaning anyway? I don't think anybody really knows the answer to that. But perhaps you meant to say that these arguments won't lead to any concrete results, and there I'd have to agree with you.

SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago

> The preference for the simplest explanation is just a heuristic. ... They care about whether an explanation is right, not simple. I disagree entirely. Given two explanations that are "right" in that they explain the observations, and one is very simple, and the other involves vast mysterious unknowns, I would say that there is a strong philosophical argument in favour of the simple explanation. Especially when complex suppositions like a "goal" of evolution have the characteristics that people are drawn to them for emotional reasons, they raise more questions than they answer.

andreasvc 14y ago
With "right" I meant the explanation which is actually correct. The preference for simple explanations is only a bias for lack of a better criterion to choose; but typically there are lots of more substantive reasons why one explanation is better than the other (e.g., by looking at how it ties in with other theories). The idea of simplicity is quite arbitrary. In machine learning there is an analogue in Minimum Description Length learning. It turns out that there the kind of representation is crucial; a hypothesis can be minimal under one representation, but not the other; ergo, what is "simple" is not a straightforward question, and therefore the heuristic is somewhat arbitrary. A "goal" to evolution may sound complex to you, but from an information theoretic perspective, the opposite, namely actual, complete randomness, is the most complex thing possible ... The whole point of this is: we don't really know, the best we can say is "I won't assume things I don't have evidence for." Lastly, your "raise more questions than they answer" is the hallmark of philosophical problems ...
- beagle3 14y ago
  > With "right" I meant the explanation which is actually correct. Outside of math (and by extension, mathematical models and virtual computer systems), there is no such thing as "correct". We have physical models we tend to rely on because they give good predictions. But there's no "correct" explanation for physical phenomena. Newton's mechanics were "correct" until Schroedinger and Heisenberg showed they weren't. And I'm sure within a hundred years, we'll have an even better model than modern quantum mechanics.
- SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago
  > Lastly, your "raise more questions than they answer" is the hallmark of philosophical problems ... Yes, and it is also a hallmark of bullshit and the content-free. The reasoning that "All X have the property Y. I have something here that is Y, therefore it must be an X" must be a classic logical fallacy, no?
- SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago
  > With "right" I meant the explanation which is actually correct. But that's not where you started out, you started with (at least) two hypotheses that fit the facts: > I mean everything that's considered evidence of evolution could also be considered evidence of teleology Comparing right to wrong would be quite a straw man.

Dn_Ab 14y ago

Actually this topic has moved beyond philosophy. There is a beautiful and simple mathematical argument and formulation of Occams Razor in terms of the universal prior of Solomonoff induction. For more, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_inference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_inference and http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Algorithmic_probability http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Algorithmic_probability. This is another but similar concept of an incomputable strategy with optimal predictive power http://hans.math.upenn.edu/~ted/203S10/References/peculiar.pdf http://hans.math.upenn.edu/~ted/203S10/References/peculiar.p... predicated on picking the simplest explanation. In a practical setting complex theories or models with lots of explanatory variables tend to overfit the data. In machine learning, regularization or picking a proper prior and things like Minimum Description length in forming networks are instances of penalizing complexity for better predictive power. In decision trees, pruning is another example. In genetic programming picking the smaller and or faster of two similarly performing programs substantially reduces its tendency to overfit.