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Ockham's razors : a user's manual / Elliott Sober.
Author
Sober, Elliott
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Format
Book
Language
English
Published/Created
Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Description
x, 314 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Availability
Available Online
Cambridge Core All Books
Copies in the Library
Location
Call Number
Status
Location Service
Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks
BC177 .S68 2015
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Details
Subject(s)
Reasoning
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Problem solving
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Simplicity (Philosophy)
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Philosophy, Medieval
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William of Ockham approximately 1285-approximately 1349
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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.
Show 71 more Contents items
ISBN
9781107068490 ((hardback paper))
1107068495 ((hardback paper))
9781107692534 ((paperback))
1107692539 ((paperback))
LCCN
2015006512
OCLC
904528769
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Ockham's razors : a user's manual / Elliott Sober for Ezra William Didier-Sober.
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