Ockham's razors : a user's manual / Elliott Sober.

Author
Sober, Elliott [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Description
x, 314 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Availability

Available Online

Copies in the Library

Location Call Number Status Location Service Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks BC177 .S68 2015 Browse related items Request

    Details

    Subject(s)
    Summary note
    Evaluates Ockham's razor, the principle of parsimony which states that simpler theories are better than more complex ones, and discusses its applications in a variety of domains.
    Notes
    "For Ezra William Didier-Sober."
    Bibliographic references
    Includes bibliographical references and index.
    Contents
    • Introduction ; A history of parsimony in thin slices (from Aristotle to Morgan)
    • The naming ceremony
    • Aristotle’s principle that nature does nothing in vain
    • How Ockham wields his razor
    • Geocentric and heliocentric astronomy
    • Descartes and Leibniz on God and the laws of nature
    • Descartes’s derivations
    • Leibniz on the best of all possible worlds
    • Newton on avoiding the luxury of superfluous causes
    • Hume on the principle of the uniformity of nature
    • Kant’s demotion of God
    • Whewell’s consilience of inductions
    • Mill tries to cut the razor down to size
    • James Clerk Maxwell, the evangelical physicist
    • Morgan’s canon
    • Concluding comments ; The probabilistic turn
    • Two philosophies of probability
    • A probability primer and the basics of Bayesianism
    • Ockham’s razor for Bayesians
    • Two kinds of prior probability
    • Jeffreys’s simplicity postulate
    • Popper’s objection to Jeffrey’s postulate
    • Popper, falsifiability, and corroboration
    • Popper’s characterization of simplicity
    • Parsimony and non-first priors
    • Likelihoods and common causes
    • On similarity
    • A three-way Reichenbachian distinction
    • Bayesian Ockham’s razor
    • Frequentism and adjustable parameters
    • How many causes for a single effect?
    • Bayesian model selection
    • The world of model selection
    • How the two parsimony paradigms differ
    • Why a false model can be more predictively accurate (and closer to the truth) than a true one
    • What the two parsimony paradigms have in common
    • Concluding comments ; Parsimony in evolutionary biology – phylogenetic inference
    • Common ancestry
    • Some history
    • Ockham meets Markov
    • Two models that entail mirroring
    • Symplesimorphies
    • The Smith/Quackdoodle theorem
    • Estimating character states of ancestors – two examples in which mirroring fails
    • Another criterion – statistical consistency
    • Still another criterion – when is parsimony more reliable than guessing?
    • Forwards and backwards
    • Estimating the character state of a leaf – anthropomorphism and comparative psychology
    • Parsimony old and new
    • Concluding comments
    • Appendices ; Parsimony in psychology – chimpanzee mind reading
    • Experiments
    • Conflicting interpretations
    • Whiten’s arrows
    • The two parsimony paradigms
    • Lessons from the blackbox
    • A different mind-reading model that also entails no screening-off
    • Learning and screening-off
    • Associations, correlations, and testing
    • Parsimony redux
    • A cross-chimpanzee comparison that is not about screening-off
    • Behaviorism versus mentalism
    • Concluding comments ; Parsimony in philosophy
    • Naturalisms
    • Atheism and the problem of evil
    • Absence of evidence and evidence of absence
    • The mind/body problem
    • The causal efficacy of the mental
    • Moral realism
    • Misinterpreting screening-off
    • Nominalism and Platonism about mathematics
    • Solipsism
    • The problem of induction
    • Concluding comments.
    ISBN
    • 9781107068490 ((hardback paper))
    • 1107068495 ((hardback paper))
    • 9781107692534 ((paperback))
    • 1107692539 ((paperback))
    LCCN
    2015006512
    OCLC
    904528769
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