RazorOckham’s Razor
Ockham’s Razor is a philosophical principle by which one tries to explain the world as we find it. The rule is that the simplest explanation that will account for what you are trying to understand tends to be correct. Another phasing of it is, “Do not multiple entities beyond necessity”, or more casually, “Don’t bring in extra beings if you don’t have to.”
A simple example is found in normal medical experience. You discover a small lump on your body. You mind begins to speculate it could be cancer. And indeed you do need to get it tested. However, the body routinely forms calcium lumps that are benign. In the face of no other evidence, calcium lump is the simplest explanation. However, if you get a blood or urine test and there are enzymes associated with cancer, then cancer becomes the simplest answer, but usually the tests confirm the lump is benign.
Ockham’s razor is not about choosing the simplest explanation point blank; it is about choosing the simplest explanation that will make sense of the full range of information. The simplest explanation can change as the incoming evidence changes.
A more playful example: If you see a pile of coconuts in the road, what is the best explanation? That a grocery store truck lost a batch coconuts while making a delivery, or that an alien space ship dropped the mother load of coconuts on Venice Island? As fun as the space ship idea may be, it raises other complexities. For example how can a spaceship travel light years to get to earth? Why were they so interested in earth coconuts? Why would they drop them? (They can get from one galaxy to another, but they can’t keep track of coconuts?) You have to have a plausible way to understand that, and it involves a lot of extra speculation. On the other hand, we see trucks carrying fruit, such as oranges and watermelons all the time in Florida. The simplest explanation tends to be correct. Don’t bring in extra entities like a space ship if you don’t have to; grocery delivery trucks are not really an “extra” because we see them in our daily experience all the time, and they are a reasonable explanation for a spill on the road.
However, alien ship theories are not always to be dismissed. Last August an unusual oblong object was seen in our solar system and it was sufficiently unusual as to warrant scientific hypothesis that it might be an alien artifact. Also the military is now acknowledging a very wide range of UFO experiences witnessed by very professional pilots. What is the best explanation? Advanced Chinese, Russian or U.S. secret technology? When is is reasonable to go “alien” ? Can an alien ship ever be the simplest explanation?
Provide your own example of a situation where Ockham’s razor could be applied, by the due date, and reply to 2 other student examples within two days.
RazorMind-Body Dualism and Ockham’s Razor
Read Descartes’ Mediation 6 (anthology p. 156-59) , and Anne Conway’s response to his Dualism, “Blurring the Distinction between Mind and Body” , p, 192-96 in the anthology.
How can you apply Ockham’s Razor to Descartes’ theory of the relation of mind and body?
Descartes is a dualist in two senses. First he is an epistemological dualist. You can know your mind, but you can’t directly know your body.
But he is also a hard dualist in that he thinks there are two kinds of substance in the universe. Spiritual substance ( or minds), and physical bodies. God , angels, and human souls (minds) are non-spatial conscious substances. The human mind is a thinking thing, an awake, thinking, non-physical substance. Matter is physical and divisible, takes up space etc…
The problem with this dualism is, if there are really two completely different types of substance, how do they hook up. How does mind move matter. How does a soul attach to a body?
Descartes was up on the dissections of his period, especially discovery of the central nervous system. Since the pineal gland was one, whereas most brain parts are double, he guess that the pineal gland was the docking point for the soul to hook to the body. But this raised a question. If the soul is really immaterial, how can it attach at all. Why aren’t our minds just floating through the universe. A space dock is when a shuttle craft hooks to specific grooved latches at a port on a space station. But how can a spirit dock? What does it attach to? Spiritual prongs?
Descartes says the mind is in the body sort of like a pilot (captain) in a ship, but more closely interwoven , yet separate kinds of substance. Some call this idea the ghost in the machine.
Read Anne Conway’s essay critiquing Descartes’s mind body dualism. What are her best arguments that mind and body much be the same kind of thing?
Her arguments are based partly on the teaching of Lucretius, and ancient Epicurean, who said that mind was just a very subtle kind of body (what we would now call brain chemistry); however she does add significant arguments of her own in building upon Lucretius. (There are 3 pages of Lucretius on Mind and body if you are really interested.) Both Lucretius and Anne Conway are using Ockham’s Razor against mind-body dualism. Plato also was a dualist, and Descartes is just a modern follower of Plato in this point. Conway would be more consistent with Aristotle’s organic functional view of the soul.
