Oh boy, this one is a hobby horse of mine. One distinction that might help is that Occam’s Razor operates at several levels, and clarifying them might help discourse.
At the inferential level, parsimony is one inductive bias among others. Simplicity by itself isn’t a probability measure, and how it bears on theory choice depends on the surrounding inferential framework. On that picture, simplicity needn’t be treated as a metaphysical claim that reality itself must be simple. It can instead be justified methodologically by the role it plays in efficient inquiry-- minimizing errors, retractions, and unnecessary detours on the way to convergence. Full disclosure: I was a student of Kelly’s at CMU, so his way of thinking about Ockham-style methods has influenced me quite a bit.
There’s also a deep problem concerning what simplicity is relative to and how the problem is encoded. There is no single uniquely privileged formal measure of scientific simplicity: parameter count, description length, and other measures of model complexity capture different things, while criteria like retractions capture different costs of inquiry. Learning theory, AIT, and related approaches can formalize and constrain parts of the problem, but they don’t make the encoding-relativity disappear. Even Kolmogorov complexity is invariant across universal description languages only up to an additive constant, which gives us an important robustness result but not a uniquely privileged finite complexity ordering independent of representation.
We also prefer the simpler explanation much less formally, as an everyday cognitive heuristic. At the collective level it becomes part of a broader set of norms affecting which hypotheses scientific communities regard as worth pursuing, funding, publishing, etc. A heuristic useful for an individual inference can have importantly different effects when embedded in institutions. I think this latter level is closest to the OP’s concern: what happens when a preference for simplicity helps govern which parts of the hypothesis space science seriously explores?
I think the OP’s exploration/exploitation framing is useful here. I’d just frame the tension a little differently: science needs enough conservatism to exploit successful research programs without constantly resetting, but enough exploratory slack to develop alternatives before demanding that they compete on the incumbent framework’s terms. As others have pointed out, some conservatism is not a bug but a feature of cumulative inquiry. But given the representation-relative nature of simplicity, a theory that reorganizes ontology or conceptual vocabulary may look ridiculously complex when translated back into the language of the framework it is trying to replace.
This is a fundamental and necessary explore/exploit tension. The danger isn’t simplicity itself so much as confusing a good rule for choosing among developed explanations with a good rule for deciding which explanations are worth developing in the first place.
As another commenter points out, bias towards the scientific status quote might actually serve quite an important purpose. If there was no bias towards the status quo at all, progress wouldn't be possible as there would be no ideas kept around for future generations of scientists to build on. But obviously this can, in principle, go too far.
Regardless, I'm not sure that it is true that the scientific status quo is always the most parsimonious. E.g. when special relativity was being first developed, arguably the ideas of Lorentz were closer to what had been the "status quo" of thought about the nature of spacetime. And note that he developed a theory which was, at least at the time, empirically basically just as good as Einstein's. But Einstein's was attractive in a number of other ways, such as being arguably simpler. And thus the status quo was starting to be overturned, partly on that very basis.
There are better razors in pursuit of explanatory power. I prefer David Deutsch’s criteria of reach and hard to vary.
A common story of science has been the rejection of simple explanations that are narrow, vague, or imprecise for more complicated ones that explain more, explain more precisely, and in an unambiguous way.
I would not view that as a criticism. As the old joke goes, "It's not a bug, it's a feature!" Bias toward the status quo is a safety measure. It's like a "fence around the Law", It is a safeguard against excessive exuberance. It can be useful. However, it has to be recognized that the practice can become excessive. For example, H. pylori was resisted as a cause of ulcers because accepting it appeared to violate parsimony: Stomach acid is hostile to bacteria; therefore chronic bacterial colonization is unlikely. In addition, there were long-established models of how stomach ulcers occur (which do accurately explain some but not most such ulcers) and treatments based on those models appeared to have worked. After enough experimentation was done, the "parsimony" had to be rejected in favor of evidence.
However, in that case, as in any other such case, the argument that parsimony is antithetical to uncovering robust scientific truth, blah, blah, blah, would actually be untenable. Parsimony ended up strengthening the newer model, because parsimony forced the new model to be strongly supported by experimental evidence.
How about we be scientific in this pursuit and you present some specific actual examples of parsimony having completely prevented a scientific truth? We can investigate those as real-world evidence or experiments. That is how science is done. It must eventually always come down to observation, or it is not science.
Instead of introducing a new example, utilizing your H. pylori case study actually highlights exactly the epistemic friction I am concerned about.
Regarding the request for an example where parsimony completely prevented a scientific truth: this demand intrinsically relies on survivorship bias. If a genuinely true hypothesis was permanently abandoned because it was deemed too complex or non-parsimonious to secure funding or institutional support, it would, by definition, remain undiscovered. We only see the theories that eventually managed to pay the "parsimony tax" & survive; we cannot empirically measure the graveyard of valid, complex hypotheses that were preemptively filtered out before robust testing could occur.
In the H. pylori case, framing parsimony as a mechanism that "strengthened" the new model overlooks the systemic failure it caused. The medical establishment's reliance on parsimony (the prior assumption that stomach acid is too hostile for bacteria) acted as an institutional blockade. Barry Marshall famously had to drink a beaker of the bacteria to bypass this epistemic bottleneck because the system refused to genuinely explore a non-parsimonious explanation. If a heuristic requires researchers to self-infect to overcome institutional inertia, it is functioning as a barrier to inquiry, not an efficient truth-tracking feature.
This points to a broader structural issue in how parsimony is applied, which can be understood through the "Exploration vs. Exploitation" trade-off in algorithmic search.
Scientific inquiry requires two distinct phases: broadly mapping the possibility space (Exploration) & narrowly optimizing within a specific model based on empirical data (Exploitation). Parsimony is strictly an exploitation heuristic. It optimizes for the lowest-cost path based on existing background knowledge.
The epistemic error occurs when science applies this exploitation heuristic during the exploration phase. By demanding parsimony too early, inquiry preemptively restricts its search radius based on old priors, assuming it already knows the terrain. This "search conservatism" forces new, unmapped phenomena to conform to the simplicity of past discoveries. It inherently filters out complex hypotheses prior to genuine empirical falsification.
Given this, if parsimony artificially truncates the possibility space before empirical searching truly begins, how can we defend it as a measure of ontological reality rather than simply a mechanism for institutional cognitive economy?
Does this framing effectively close off their avenues for pedantic dismissal while maintaining the philosophical rigor required by the subreddit?
Yesterday's systemic failure, if not perpetuated, becomes a footnote. Nothing you stated makes parsimony antithetical to truth discovery. One might as well claim that the requirement to be able to perform statistical analyses is antithetical to scientific discovery. After all, it's a hurdle to be overcome, just like parsimony. Indeed, one could make a case that any principle at all that is higher than blind and credulous adoption of any daffy brain fart is "antithetical" to scientific discovery.
My pointing out that a panty-twister got upset got even more dislikes--I don't presume it was you. I wonder what kind of so-called "mind" would have been offended by my answer.
I agree with your initial response, but complaints about internet votes are often downvoted because they don't contribute to the discussion and can actually derail it. Between Reddit's fuzzy vote display (you don't see the actual counts until much later as part of their efforts to discourage vote tampering), the fact that some sad people will downvote everyone's response other than their own to attempt to raise their comment's profile (i.e., the vote tampering Reddit is responding to), and the fact that some people are just crazy, it's never worth discussing your comments being voted upon one way or another.
There is no real selection here. You can test models that acquire fewer assumptions easier and faster than models that require more assumptions, so it's better to start there than design highly complex research the readout of which will be difficult to interpret. So start with the simple ones and if you can falsify them, throw them out and move on to the next simple one.
As a layman, and a somewhat uneducated layman at that I kind of peeked around the edge of the door at this thread because it was intriguing and I just wanted to say thank you for the topic, and the intelligent and civil discussion of it. As an American, I have sorely missed this and it’s not easy to come by in this very strange age of… for lack of a better term, “enshittification” of everything that was once exceptional, or at the very least adequate.
Are you seriously saying I have no regard for the significance of the 'signs' I use? & that somehow I am misusing them at that?
Could you please corroborate your claim by telling me which words or concepts I 'misused,' & which I had 'no regard' for (if you intended these as two separate critiques)?
If you have to use quotation marks in your writing, as in "epistemic debt", you probably should get a clearer picture of what you want to say. Debt to who? In relation to what? The objective truth? Same with "expensive". Scratch the quotation and articulate the message.
"I am trying to understand the limits of". You are trying to understand. Knowing the limits of something is exactly the same as knowing what something is as knowing what something is requires knowledge of what it is not.
My use of epistemic debt is a bit opaque & asking for a lot, I'll give you that.
The other scare quotes, however, were distance myself from the inherent assumptions implicit to how those words are conventionally used in science.
I, for instance, don't think the word expensive deserves as much focus as it receives in the current discourse, I even think it is only correct from within certain frameworks.
However, the expense is relative & especially when you consider the net cost of our current behaviors in science. The epistemic debt was a poor analogy, but in essence I was trying to say that the costs we cut when it comes to considering, rather than excluding, the more complex & demanding theories is the accumulation of ad hoc adjustments to current theories & the increased difficulty in divesting our attention & resources from our current trajectory & further, exploring those alternative trajectories.
Diminishing autonomy as it relates to inquiry as a result of the emphasis on 'parsimony,' which I scare quote because I think its conceptual validity is somewhat dubious & should be re-examined & perhaps redefined for our improved use of it moving forward.
& lastly, "I am trying to understand" does not equal "I am trying to understand the limits of", the latter has a finer granularity of focus, & a qualified area of focus, whereas the prior is broad to the point of including many alternative meanings which are inaccurate for my purposes.
I am not without understanding as it relates to Occam's Razor, I understand it quite well on various levels of application, however I am trying to probe specifically at how it is limited, & perhaps how those limitations hold the potential to hold science back or inadequately direct its focus.
That’s already too much information. Something I have learned by actually doing academic philosophy, is that people online, philosophers or otherwise, are mostly just interested in refutations of pet peeves of theirs. More than a few lines of text will only scarcily have people who actually engage. Most will have just learned something in the past year or so and are now hell bent on making other people feel stupid not knowing this thing they recently learned.
Even if the other commenter does reply, I just wanted to say thank you for taking a moment commiserate & be empathetic (:
I have often felt on the outs for my way of thinking, or asking the questions I have or expressing the discomforts I have with the way things are going... even in, or even sometimes especially in, philosophical & academic circles, even though I freaking love these spaces so much & don't just dilly dally there, it can feel like I'm standing against an oncoming torrent sometimes when I'm just trying to talk bro...
Lmao you've outlawed the use of quotation marks for no reason, in defense of your completely non-rigorously-defined anti-intellectual slang phrase. You should just stop sloppy.
Oh please, that’s the kind of pedantic voluntary misunderstanding of things why I dislike this subreddit sometimes. Angry graduates trying to get their frustrations out by tripping over minute problems in definitions and terms… yeah I know, you read a bunch of stuff I havent. Theres other, more productive, ways to address this.
You might be reading into the narcissistic part. That’s quite the psychologising you are doing there. And it just reads as if you are very frustrated. This sub isn’t some debate, people are regularly just asking questions in good faith.
Do you espouse academia, & yet claim to hold the power to diagnose random people on the internet without anything close to a formal assessment?
Bro or brodette or other, I'm sorry but you are frustrating me so much & so hypocritical.
Your mentality & your approach to this conversation & free inquiry are wrong, they are harmful, they hurt both you & the people you are speaking to, because you feel pressed into a corner you are resorting to attacks against my character & indifferent to what effects that nay have on me or the hostile environment thay creates for other people.
Please receive my critique in good faith, I'm very frustrated but I hold no ill will towards you.
It may not be directly relevant, but you may be interested in https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/learning-formal/ . In particular, section 5 relates Occam's Razor with minimizing the number of belief changes (under a particular definition of simplicity).
I wanted to suggest this not because of the "status quo" thing, but because it might be relevant to your general thoughts. Here the minimisation of belief changes is considered a good thing.
In terms of how it may "restrict the genuine space of possibilities", I'm not sure quite what you're looking for. It seems quite easy to come up with a reasonable counterexample to its "absolute accuracy", such as two diseases producing symptoms consistent with a single other, or something like that. I imagine you could construct something fitting your requirements.
I know nothing about the literature in this area. I also don't know much about the article, I just happen to have read it before.
Someone already mentioned Feyerabend, but he is almost certainly what you're looking for.
The trouble you're going to run into with this line of thinking is that parsimony is also baked into our current best understanding of what makes a scientific theory true. I'd say it's an open question whether there is any significant room to relax the principle of parsimony without sacrificing rigor, but it does seem unlikely.
Regarding that final question, do you know of any specific resources to share that could help me understand where the state of the current discourse is?
& would you mind telling me why you think it is unlikely? I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter (:
> would you mind telling me why you think it is unlikely?
I probably won't be able to give an adequate answer in a short comment, but, simply put, I don't really endorse greater accuracy as a goal because if we're choosing between many scientific theories, it should be a given that they're all sufficiently accurate. The choice has to be based on other theoretical virtues, and I do think simplicity and unification are at least equally important.
What? Yeah, so if scientists are ever happy and justified to do "little ad-hoc corrections" then clearly there is sometimes a problem with throwing out theories if there "is even the slightest reason for doubt".
As I say in my comment, and u/Temporary_Stranger39 does in theirs, there are good reasons to want to be at least a little bit conservative about scientific theories/hypotheses, certainly if they have garnered some level of evidential support already.
> I am trying to understand the limits of Occam's Razor in theory choice. It seems that evaluating the "simplest" explanation often requires measuring which hypothesis demands the fewest modifications to our already-existing background beliefs.
No not really.
The mathematical formalization of "simplicity" is komogorov complexity.
You can think of it as, how many lines of code would it require to simulate what we observed if you were programming the universe from scratch.
Anything that reduces the number of lines of code — even in our background assumptions of how the universe works — is more parsimonious than what came before it.
> Has there been work done on how parsimony might accumulate "epistemic debt" over time? Specifically, I am looking for literature exploring how the mandate for simplicity might restrict the genuine space of possibilities, causing researchers to iterate endlessly on a localized paradigm rather than undertaking the "expensive" epistemic shifts required to discover a more accurate, albeit highly complex, framework.
It's not exactly that, but Solomonoff induction is a mathematical proof that if you assume materialism, the best scientific explanation is the one with the lowest kolmogorov complexity.
I'm sorry, but could you explain to me why materialism is assumed?
I'm agnostic to materialist or non-materialist (without presuming thebonly alternative to materialism to be spiritual or religious metaphysics) starting points.
I would imagine science would be considered more 'methodologically' materialist than axiomatically, if we consider it as a tool instead of a social institution? Is that not the case? (Genuine question)
Edit: Thank you for your thorough answer, I haven't heard of those concepts yet, so I'll have to dig deeper into them!
> I'm sorry, but could you explain to me why materialism is assumed?
It's a theory like any other. You can reject materialism, but that would both be its own assumption and have to be done without evidence. In fact, doing so rejects the prospect that evidence can exist as anything supernatural is the direct hypothesis that effects don't necessarily follow from causes. You'd have a hard time explaining how science is successful in that case.
> I'm agnostic to materialist or non-materialist (without presuming thebonly alternative to materialism to be spiritual or religious metaphysics) starting points.
Things don't have to be dressed up for Halloween to be supernatural. Any claim that something cannot be explained by any possible laws of physics is directly a claim that it is supernatural. To be natural is to be explainable by some possible set of physical explanations. To say something isn't is to presume science doesn't and cannot work.
I'm a materialist simply because I'm not ready to make that assumption as there cannot ever be any evidence of it. Antimaterialism is a negative claim. Claiming an observation has a supernatural cause would require exploring literally all other possibilities and falsifying them -- otherwise, it's just jumping to a conclusion. We simply have not done that.
> I would imagine science would be considered more 'methodologically' materialist than axiomatically, if we consider it as a tool instead of a social institution? Is that not the case? (Genuine question)
Correct. Materialism isn't an axiom. It's a theory. It could be falsified of anyone could show definitively that some observation cannot even theoretically have a physical ecplanation, but that would require a better explanation for what we observe and I don't have one.
Interesting, I have never heard of materialism described as a theory rather than an axiom (when not speaking purely of it as a methodological necessity).
I think that reframes a little bit of how I view materialism.
However, I find issue with the idea that non-materialist perspectives are positivist while materialist perspectives are not... I can see exactly how that could be true in the particular case, however making the same claim in the absolute case would exclude a lot more subtle arguments than what would typically be called 'supernatural.'
For instance, if the universe is not fundamentally constructed of physical material, then physicalism does not win, however, if physicalism defines the physical as 'the universe' or 'whatever the universe is made of', I think you would agree with me that thay claim is broad to the point of being meaningless.
Thus, as I understand it, several non-materialist perspectives could arise which simply cast doubt on the use of the word physical or material as the basal subtrate of reality &/or suggest a different substrate which they describe as something different than what is typically intended by material & physical.
It doesn't need to be 'mind' & it doesn't need to be 'spirit' & it doesn't need to be consciousness or brahma or the abrahamic deity himself, it can simply be something which has different properties than the physical.
Heck, even the virtual & mathematical & informational spaces could be described as more fundamental & yet not physical or material, but nonetheless structuring & guiding the material & physical world.
I could be fully wrong about my understanding, & I'm not trying to be antagonistic, I'm sorry if it sounds that way.
I genuinely still don't understand why materialism should be the baseline assumption yet, rather than a merely agnostic stance like mine (not that mine is better, I don't believe it is, but I mean it when I say I don't understand I mean that genuinely, rather than as a critique, & without a greater confidence or completeness of that understanding, I wouldn't want to make an assumption)
> However, I find issue with the idea that non-materialist perspectives are positivist while materialist perspectives are not...
They certainly don't have to be. Anyone can hold any thesis based on any motivation. But fallibalism and anti-materialism are very hard to hold in concert. And indictivism (an yes positivism in particular) are common epistemologies that do allow anti-materialism.
> I can see exactly how that could be true in the particular case, however making the same claim in the absolute case would exclude a lot more subtle arguments than what would typically be called 'supernatural.'
I agree. But I haven't heard any which are internally consistent about what comprises the "supernatural".
Either the supernatural is the set of all phenomena which cannot be known via the scientific process (which is inherently fallibalist), or it is knowable by the process of science and is therefore... Materialism in disguise.
> For instance, if the universe is not fundamentally constructed of physical material, then physicalism does not win, however, if physicalism defines the physical as 'the universe' or 'whatever the universe is made of', I think you would agree with me that thay claim is broad to the point of being meaningless.
I would agree with the latter. But the former is just out of date (and arguable the positivist take). The association between materialism and atoms being little billiard balls broke down a century ago. But perhaps we can avoid the semantics by labelling it "naturalism"?: The prospect that the universe consists of the natural (that which may be codified in terms of cause and effect) and not the supernatural (that which cannot).
What do you think?
> Thus, as I understand it, several non-materialist perspectives could arise which simply cast doubt on the use of the word physical or material as the basal subtrate of reality &/or suggest a different substrate which they describe as something different than what is typically intended by material & physical.
For me, the question is that of epiphenomenalism. If the thing which causes the "material" is immaterial, how is mass-energy concerved?
For anything to be immaterial and truly cause measureable events/phenomena/observations, it has to violate the laws of physics. And not just these laws. But all possible closed formulations. It has to break physical causality somewhere. It must be supernatural. Right?
> It doesn't need to be 'mind' & it doesn't need to be 'spirit' & it doesn't need to be consciousness or brahma or the abrahamic deity himself, it can simply be something which has different properties than the physical.
Not just different. In order for a physical brain to become aware of this thing, such that the brain causes muscles to vibrate air molecules and comprise our statements about this non-phulysical thing, this thing must violate that chain of physical causlity at some point. Can we agree on that? I believe even Chalmers had to bite that bullet.
> Heck, even the virtual & mathematical & informational spaces could be described as more fundamental & yet not physical or material, but nonetheless structuring & guiding the material & physical world.
I don't think they can as it would violate causality. As I think I said earlier, mathematics is actually dependent upon physics, not the other way around.
>
, & I'm not trying to be antagonistic, I'm sorry if it sounds that way.
Not at all!!
It's exactly the kind of discussion I come here for. You're representing real ideas real philosophers present. In fact I think your overall argument is called Hempel's Dilemma. I just happened to think it's fallacious. Many wouldn't agree.
> I genuinely still don't understand why materialism should be the baseline assumption yet, rather than a merely agnostic stance like mine
I would argue that materialism as the more parsimonious stance is the agnostic stance. Claiming there is more ought to come with its own burden of proof — unless you want to argue that the material world doesnt exist at all.
johnny_logic | 12 hours ago
Oh boy, this one is a hobby horse of mine. One distinction that might help is that Occam’s Razor operates at several levels, and clarifying them might help discourse.
At the inferential level, parsimony is one inductive bias among others. Simplicity by itself isn’t a probability measure, and how it bears on theory choice depends on the surrounding inferential framework. On that picture, simplicity needn’t be treated as a metaphysical claim that reality itself must be simple. It can instead be justified methodologically by the role it plays in efficient inquiry-- minimizing errors, retractions, and unnecessary detours on the way to convergence. Full disclosure: I was a student of Kelly’s at CMU, so his way of thinking about Ockham-style methods has influenced me quite a bit.
There’s also a deep problem concerning what simplicity is relative to and how the problem is encoded. There is no single uniquely privileged formal measure of scientific simplicity: parameter count, description length, and other measures of model complexity capture different things, while criteria like retractions capture different costs of inquiry. Learning theory, AIT, and related approaches can formalize and constrain parts of the problem, but they don’t make the encoding-relativity disappear. Even Kolmogorov complexity is invariant across universal description languages only up to an additive constant, which gives us an important robustness result but not a uniquely privileged finite complexity ordering independent of representation.
We also prefer the simpler explanation much less formally, as an everyday cognitive heuristic. At the collective level it becomes part of a broader set of norms affecting which hypotheses scientific communities regard as worth pursuing, funding, publishing, etc. A heuristic useful for an individual inference can have importantly different effects when embedded in institutions. I think this latter level is closest to the OP’s concern: what happens when a preference for simplicity helps govern which parts of the hypothesis space science seriously explores?
I think the OP’s exploration/exploitation framing is useful here. I’d just frame the tension a little differently: science needs enough conservatism to exploit successful research programs without constantly resetting, but enough exploratory slack to develop alternatives before demanding that they compete on the incumbent framework’s terms. As others have pointed out, some conservatism is not a bug but a feature of cumulative inquiry. But given the representation-relative nature of simplicity, a theory that reorganizes ontology or conceptual vocabulary may look ridiculously complex when translated back into the language of the framework it is trying to replace.
This is a fundamental and necessary explore/exploit tension. The danger isn’t simplicity itself so much as confusing a good rule for choosing among developed explanations with a good rule for deciding which explanations are worth developing in the first place.
Themoopanator123 | 15 hours ago
As another commenter points out, bias towards the scientific status quote might actually serve quite an important purpose. If there was no bias towards the status quo at all, progress wouldn't be possible as there would be no ideas kept around for future generations of scientists to build on. But obviously this can, in principle, go too far.
Regardless, I'm not sure that it is true that the scientific status quo is always the most parsimonious. E.g. when special relativity was being first developed, arguably the ideas of Lorentz were closer to what had been the "status quo" of thought about the nature of spacetime. And note that he developed a theory which was, at least at the time, empirically basically just as good as Einstein's. But Einstein's was attractive in a number of other ways, such as being arguably simpler. And thus the status quo was starting to be overturned, partly on that very basis.
ThMogget | 3 hours ago
There are better razors in pursuit of explanatory power. I prefer David Deutsch’s criteria of reach and hard to vary.
A common story of science has been the rejection of simple explanations that are narrow, vague, or imprecise for more complicated ones that explain more, explain more precisely, and in an unambiguous way.
Temporary_Stranger39 | 15 hours ago
I would not view that as a criticism. As the old joke goes, "It's not a bug, it's a feature!" Bias toward the status quo is a safety measure. It's like a "fence around the Law", It is a safeguard against excessive exuberance. It can be useful. However, it has to be recognized that the practice can become excessive. For example, H. pylori was resisted as a cause of ulcers because accepting it appeared to violate parsimony: Stomach acid is hostile to bacteria; therefore chronic bacterial colonization is unlikely. In addition, there were long-established models of how stomach ulcers occur (which do accurately explain some but not most such ulcers) and treatments based on those models appeared to have worked. After enough experimentation was done, the "parsimony" had to be rejected in favor of evidence.
However, in that case, as in any other such case, the argument that parsimony is antithetical to uncovering robust scientific truth, blah, blah, blah, would actually be untenable. Parsimony ended up strengthening the newer model, because parsimony forced the new model to be strongly supported by experimental evidence.
How about we be scientific in this pursuit and you present some specific actual examples of parsimony having completely prevented a scientific truth? We can investigate those as real-world evidence or experiments. That is how science is done. It must eventually always come down to observation, or it is not science.
[OP] Neutron_Farts | 13 hours ago
Instead of introducing a new example, utilizing your H. pylori case study actually highlights exactly the epistemic friction I am concerned about.
Regarding the request for an example where parsimony completely prevented a scientific truth: this demand intrinsically relies on survivorship bias. If a genuinely true hypothesis was permanently abandoned because it was deemed too complex or non-parsimonious to secure funding or institutional support, it would, by definition, remain undiscovered. We only see the theories that eventually managed to pay the "parsimony tax" & survive; we cannot empirically measure the graveyard of valid, complex hypotheses that were preemptively filtered out before robust testing could occur.
In the H. pylori case, framing parsimony as a mechanism that "strengthened" the new model overlooks the systemic failure it caused. The medical establishment's reliance on parsimony (the prior assumption that stomach acid is too hostile for bacteria) acted as an institutional blockade. Barry Marshall famously had to drink a beaker of the bacteria to bypass this epistemic bottleneck because the system refused to genuinely explore a non-parsimonious explanation. If a heuristic requires researchers to self-infect to overcome institutional inertia, it is functioning as a barrier to inquiry, not an efficient truth-tracking feature.
This points to a broader structural issue in how parsimony is applied, which can be understood through the "Exploration vs. Exploitation" trade-off in algorithmic search.
Scientific inquiry requires two distinct phases: broadly mapping the possibility space (Exploration) & narrowly optimizing within a specific model based on empirical data (Exploitation). Parsimony is strictly an exploitation heuristic. It optimizes for the lowest-cost path based on existing background knowledge.
The epistemic error occurs when science applies this exploitation heuristic during the exploration phase. By demanding parsimony too early, inquiry preemptively restricts its search radius based on old priors, assuming it already knows the terrain. This "search conservatism" forces new, unmapped phenomena to conform to the simplicity of past discoveries. It inherently filters out complex hypotheses prior to genuine empirical falsification.
Given this, if parsimony artificially truncates the possibility space before empirical searching truly begins, how can we defend it as a measure of ontological reality rather than simply a mechanism for institutional cognitive economy?
Does this framing effectively close off their avenues for pedantic dismissal while maintaining the philosophical rigor required by the subreddit?
Temporary_Stranger39 | 11 hours ago
Yesterday's systemic failure, if not perpetuated, becomes a footnote. Nothing you stated makes parsimony antithetical to truth discovery. One might as well claim that the requirement to be able to perform statistical analyses is antithetical to scientific discovery. After all, it's a hurdle to be overcome, just like parsimony. Indeed, one could make a case that any principle at all that is higher than blind and credulous adoption of any daffy brain fart is "antithetical" to scientific discovery.
Temporary_Stranger39 | 15 hours ago
Uh, oh, looks like I upset a panty-twister.
[OP] Neutron_Farts | 14 hours ago
That wasn't me! I liked your response! Thank you for your thorough response (:
Temporary_Stranger39 | 14 hours ago
My pointing out that a panty-twister got upset got even more dislikes--I don't presume it was you. I wonder what kind of so-called "mind" would have been offended by my answer.
Offish | 14 hours ago
I agree with your initial response, but complaints about internet votes are often downvoted because they don't contribute to the discussion and can actually derail it. Between Reddit's fuzzy vote display (you don't see the actual counts until much later as part of their efforts to discourage vote tampering), the fact that some sad people will downvote everyone's response other than their own to attempt to raise their comment's profile (i.e., the vote tampering Reddit is responding to), and the fact that some people are just crazy, it's never worth discussing your comments being voted upon one way or another.
Temporary_Stranger39 | 11 hours ago
Worth it? No. Amusing? Often.
Mono_Clear | 14 hours ago
Occums razor isn't imposing a restriction on inquiries, it acknowledges the most likely cause before branching out into less and less likely scenarios
hydrOHxide | 13 hours ago
There is no real selection here. You can test models that acquire fewer assumptions easier and faster than models that require more assumptions, so it's better to start there than design highly complex research the readout of which will be difficult to interpret. So start with the simple ones and if you can falsify them, throw them out and move on to the next simple one.
[OP] Neutron_Farts | 12 hours ago
How frequently do scientists use the principle of parsimony via assumption reduction, versus other scenarios?
I don't refute the usefulness of assumption-limiting, however, I think that only addresses some aspects of what the principle of parsimony refers to.
mrmike5157 | 3 hours ago
As a layman, and a somewhat uneducated layman at that I kind of peeked around the edge of the door at this thread because it was intriguing and I just wanted to say thank you for the topic, and the intelligent and civil discussion of it. As an American, I have sorely missed this and it’s not easy to come by in this very strange age of… for lack of a better term, “enshittification” of everything that was once exceptional, or at the very least adequate.
avg_dopamine_enjoyer | 15 hours ago
Horrible world salad but try Paul Feyerabend as an example
Conscious_Pause_1499 | 14 hours ago
"word salad"
Can you define this term rigorously? Thanks.
avg_dopamine_enjoyer | 14 hours ago
An act of misusing signs without any regard for what they signify.
Amateur hour over here
[OP] Neutron_Farts | 13 hours ago
Are you seriously saying I have no regard for the significance of the 'signs' I use? & that somehow I am misusing them at that?
Could you please corroborate your claim by telling me which words or concepts I 'misused,' & which I had 'no regard' for (if you intended these as two separate critiques)?
avg_dopamine_enjoyer | 13 hours ago
If you have to use quotation marks in your writing, as in "epistemic debt", you probably should get a clearer picture of what you want to say. Debt to who? In relation to what? The objective truth? Same with "expensive". Scratch the quotation and articulate the message.
"I am trying to understand the limits of". You are trying to understand. Knowing the limits of something is exactly the same as knowing what something is as knowing what something is requires knowledge of what it is not.
[OP] Neutron_Farts | 13 hours ago
My use of epistemic debt is a bit opaque & asking for a lot, I'll give you that.
The other scare quotes, however, were distance myself from the inherent assumptions implicit to how those words are conventionally used in science.
I, for instance, don't think the word expensive deserves as much focus as it receives in the current discourse, I even think it is only correct from within certain frameworks.
However, the expense is relative & especially when you consider the net cost of our current behaviors in science. The epistemic debt was a poor analogy, but in essence I was trying to say that the costs we cut when it comes to considering, rather than excluding, the more complex & demanding theories is the accumulation of ad hoc adjustments to current theories & the increased difficulty in divesting our attention & resources from our current trajectory & further, exploring those alternative trajectories.
Diminishing autonomy as it relates to inquiry as a result of the emphasis on 'parsimony,' which I scare quote because I think its conceptual validity is somewhat dubious & should be re-examined & perhaps redefined for our improved use of it moving forward.
& lastly, "I am trying to understand" does not equal "I am trying to understand the limits of", the latter has a finer granularity of focus, & a qualified area of focus, whereas the prior is broad to the point of including many alternative meanings which are inaccurate for my purposes.
I am not without understanding as it relates to Occam's Razor, I understand it quite well on various levels of application, however I am trying to probe specifically at how it is limited, & perhaps how those limitations hold the potential to hold science back or inadequately direct its focus.
PytheasTheMassaliot | 12 hours ago
That’s already too much information. Something I have learned by actually doing academic philosophy, is that people online, philosophers or otherwise, are mostly just interested in refutations of pet peeves of theirs. More than a few lines of text will only scarcily have people who actually engage. Most will have just learned something in the past year or so and are now hell bent on making other people feel stupid not knowing this thing they recently learned.
[OP] Neutron_Farts | 12 hours ago
Even if the other commenter does reply, I just wanted to say thank you for taking a moment commiserate & be empathetic (:
I have often felt on the outs for my way of thinking, or asking the questions I have or expressing the discomforts I have with the way things are going... even in, or even sometimes especially in, philosophical & academic circles, even though I freaking love these spaces so much & don't just dilly dally there, it can feel like I'm standing against an oncoming torrent sometimes when I'm just trying to talk bro...
Conscious_Pause_1499 | 8 hours ago
Lmao you've outlawed the use of quotation marks for no reason, in defense of your completely non-rigorously-defined anti-intellectual slang phrase. You should just stop sloppy.
PytheasTheMassaliot | 13 hours ago
Oh please, that’s the kind of pedantic voluntary misunderstanding of things why I dislike this subreddit sometimes. Angry graduates trying to get their frustrations out by tripping over minute problems in definitions and terms… yeah I know, you read a bunch of stuff I havent. Theres other, more productive, ways to address this.
avg_dopamine_enjoyer | 13 hours ago
Your "voluntary misunderstanding" is my "arguing against narcissistic vagueness"
PytheasTheMassaliot | 12 hours ago
You might be reading into the narcissistic part. That’s quite the psychologising you are doing there. And it just reads as if you are very frustrated. This sub isn’t some debate, people are regularly just asking questions in good faith.
[OP] Neutron_Farts | 12 hours ago
Are you a psychologist?
Do you espouse academia, & yet claim to hold the power to diagnose random people on the internet without anything close to a formal assessment?
Bro or brodette or other, I'm sorry but you are frustrating me so much & so hypocritical.
Your mentality & your approach to this conversation & free inquiry are wrong, they are harmful, they hurt both you & the people you are speaking to, because you feel pressed into a corner you are resorting to attacks against my character & indifferent to what effects that nay have on me or the hostile environment thay creates for other people.
Please receive my critique in good faith, I'm very frustrated but I hold no ill will towards you.
Feeling-Picture6191 | 14 hours ago
It may not be directly relevant, but you may be interested in https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/learning-formal/ . In particular, section 5 relates Occam's Razor with minimizing the number of belief changes (under a particular definition of simplicity).
I wanted to suggest this not because of the "status quo" thing, but because it might be relevant to your general thoughts. Here the minimisation of belief changes is considered a good thing.
In terms of how it may "restrict the genuine space of possibilities", I'm not sure quite what you're looking for. It seems quite easy to come up with a reasonable counterexample to its "absolute accuracy", such as two diseases producing symptoms consistent with a single other, or something like that. I imagine you could construct something fitting your requirements.
I know nothing about the literature in this area. I also don't know much about the article, I just happen to have read it before.
shedtear | 14 hours ago
You might check out the discussion of values in science from Helen Longino in "Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Values in Science: Rethinking the Dichotomy".
schakalsynthetc | 14 hours ago
Someone already mentioned Feyerabend, but he is almost certainly what you're looking for.
The trouble you're going to run into with this line of thinking is that parsimony is also baked into our current best understanding of what makes a scientific theory true. I'd say it's an open question whether there is any significant room to relax the principle of parsimony without sacrificing rigor, but it does seem unlikely.
[OP] Neutron_Farts | 13 hours ago
Regarding that final question, do you know of any specific resources to share that could help me understand where the state of the current discourse is?
& would you mind telling me why you think it is unlikely? I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter (:
schakalsynthetc | 11 hours ago
The "state of the current discourse" is a very broad thing, but the SEP article Scientific Progress is pretty good. Also, SEP entry for Lakatos, esp the Lakatos vs. Feyerabend chapter.
> would you mind telling me why you think it is unlikely?
I probably won't be able to give an adequate answer in a short comment, but, simply put, I don't really endorse greater accuracy as a goal because if we're choosing between many scientific theories, it should be a given that they're all sufficiently accurate. The choice has to be based on other theoretical virtues, and I do think simplicity and unification are at least equally important.
mirh | 15 hours ago
Parsimony is about the simplest explanation "all things the same".
If there is even the slightest reason for doubt, then there's no problem doing away with it.
Themoopanator123 | 15 hours ago
Wouldn't go that far. Chucking away theories or hypotheses for which we have "the slightest reason to doubt" is not how science works.
mirh | 15 hours ago
It kinda is? Like, you start from where you know facts misalign with theory, not from where they check out.
Then you can decide to do a little ad-hoc correction, or a whole new paradigm.
Themoopanator123 | 15 hours ago
What? Yeah, so if scientists are ever happy and justified to do "little ad-hoc corrections" then clearly there is sometimes a problem with throwing out theories if there "is even the slightest reason for doubt".
As I say in my comment, and u/Temporary_Stranger39 does in theirs, there are good reasons to want to be at least a little bit conservative about scientific theories/hypotheses, certainly if they have garnered some level of evidential support already.
mirh | 15 hours ago
Obviously the assumption is that even any other whole new theory should fit with all the evidence the current theory explains well?
And that you cannot hodgepodge so much a theory that it becomes the dragon in your garage.
Themoopanator123 | 15 hours ago
I don't understand what you're saying.
mirh | 14 hours ago
If you are doing ad-hoc modifications, you can only do it so much as it doesn't become a monster of "ifs" and "buts".
If you are doing a new theory, obviously it has to be able to explain whatever is currently perfectly explain by the current theory too.
knockingatthegate | 15 hours ago
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, SEP, would be the right place to start.
fox-mcleod | 15 hours ago
> I am trying to understand the limits of Occam's Razor in theory choice. It seems that evaluating the "simplest" explanation often requires measuring which hypothesis demands the fewest modifications to our already-existing background beliefs.
No not really.
The mathematical formalization of "simplicity" is komogorov complexity.
You can think of it as, how many lines of code would it require to simulate what we observed if you were programming the universe from scratch.
Anything that reduces the number of lines of code — even in our background assumptions of how the universe works — is more parsimonious than what came before it.
> Has there been work done on how parsimony might accumulate "epistemic debt" over time? Specifically, I am looking for literature exploring how the mandate for simplicity might restrict the genuine space of possibilities, causing researchers to iterate endlessly on a localized paradigm rather than undertaking the "expensive" epistemic shifts required to discover a more accurate, albeit highly complex, framework.
It's not exactly that, but Solomonoff induction is a mathematical proof that if you assume materialism, the best scientific explanation is the one with the lowest kolmogorov complexity.
[OP] Neutron_Farts | 15 hours ago
I'm sorry, but could you explain to me why materialism is assumed?
I'm agnostic to materialist or non-materialist (without presuming thebonly alternative to materialism to be spiritual or religious metaphysics) starting points.
I would imagine science would be considered more 'methodologically' materialist than axiomatically, if we consider it as a tool instead of a social institution? Is that not the case? (Genuine question)
Edit: Thank you for your thorough answer, I haven't heard of those concepts yet, so I'll have to dig deeper into them!
fox-mcleod | 13 hours ago
> I'm sorry, but could you explain to me why materialism is assumed?
It's a theory like any other. You can reject materialism, but that would both be its own assumption and have to be done without evidence. In fact, doing so rejects the prospect that evidence can exist as anything supernatural is the direct hypothesis that effects don't necessarily follow from causes. You'd have a hard time explaining how science is successful in that case.
> I'm agnostic to materialist or non-materialist (without presuming thebonly alternative to materialism to be spiritual or religious metaphysics) starting points.
Things don't have to be dressed up for Halloween to be supernatural. Any claim that something cannot be explained by any possible laws of physics is directly a claim that it is supernatural. To be natural is to be explainable by some possible set of physical explanations. To say something isn't is to presume science doesn't and cannot work.
I'm a materialist simply because I'm not ready to make that assumption as there cannot ever be any evidence of it. Antimaterialism is a negative claim. Claiming an observation has a supernatural cause would require exploring literally all other possibilities and falsifying them -- otherwise, it's just jumping to a conclusion. We simply have not done that.
> I would imagine science would be considered more 'methodologically' materialist than axiomatically, if we consider it as a tool instead of a social institution? Is that not the case? (Genuine question)
Correct. Materialism isn't an axiom. It's a theory. It could be falsified of anyone could show definitively that some observation cannot even theoretically have a physical ecplanation, but that would require a better explanation for what we observe and I don't have one.
[OP] Neutron_Farts | 12 hours ago
Interesting, I have never heard of materialism described as a theory rather than an axiom (when not speaking purely of it as a methodological necessity).
I think that reframes a little bit of how I view materialism.
However, I find issue with the idea that non-materialist perspectives are positivist while materialist perspectives are not... I can see exactly how that could be true in the particular case, however making the same claim in the absolute case would exclude a lot more subtle arguments than what would typically be called 'supernatural.'
For instance, if the universe is not fundamentally constructed of physical material, then physicalism does not win, however, if physicalism defines the physical as 'the universe' or 'whatever the universe is made of', I think you would agree with me that thay claim is broad to the point of being meaningless.
Thus, as I understand it, several non-materialist perspectives could arise which simply cast doubt on the use of the word physical or material as the basal subtrate of reality &/or suggest a different substrate which they describe as something different than what is typically intended by material & physical.
It doesn't need to be 'mind' & it doesn't need to be 'spirit' & it doesn't need to be consciousness or brahma or the abrahamic deity himself, it can simply be something which has different properties than the physical.
Heck, even the virtual & mathematical & informational spaces could be described as more fundamental & yet not physical or material, but nonetheless structuring & guiding the material & physical world.
I could be fully wrong about my understanding, & I'm not trying to be antagonistic, I'm sorry if it sounds that way.
I genuinely still don't understand why materialism should be the baseline assumption yet, rather than a merely agnostic stance like mine (not that mine is better, I don't believe it is, but I mean it when I say I don't understand I mean that genuinely, rather than as a critique, & without a greater confidence or completeness of that understanding, I wouldn't want to make an assumption)
fox-mcleod | 11 hours ago
> However, I find issue with the idea that non-materialist perspectives are positivist while materialist perspectives are not...
They certainly don't have to be. Anyone can hold any thesis based on any motivation. But fallibalism and anti-materialism are very hard to hold in concert. And indictivism (an yes positivism in particular) are common epistemologies that do allow anti-materialism.
> I can see exactly how that could be true in the particular case, however making the same claim in the absolute case would exclude a lot more subtle arguments than what would typically be called 'supernatural.'
I agree. But I haven't heard any which are internally consistent about what comprises the "supernatural".
Either the supernatural is the set of all phenomena which cannot be known via the scientific process (which is inherently fallibalist), or it is knowable by the process of science and is therefore... Materialism in disguise.
> For instance, if the universe is not fundamentally constructed of physical material, then physicalism does not win, however, if physicalism defines the physical as 'the universe' or 'whatever the universe is made of', I think you would agree with me that thay claim is broad to the point of being meaningless.
I would agree with the latter. But the former is just out of date (and arguable the positivist take). The association between materialism and atoms being little billiard balls broke down a century ago. But perhaps we can avoid the semantics by labelling it "naturalism"?: The prospect that the universe consists of the natural (that which may be codified in terms of cause and effect) and not the supernatural (that which cannot).
What do you think?
> Thus, as I understand it, several non-materialist perspectives could arise which simply cast doubt on the use of the word physical or material as the basal subtrate of reality &/or suggest a different substrate which they describe as something different than what is typically intended by material & physical.
For me, the question is that of epiphenomenalism. If the thing which causes the "material" is immaterial, how is mass-energy concerved?
For anything to be immaterial and truly cause measureable events/phenomena/observations, it has to violate the laws of physics. And not just these laws. But all possible closed formulations. It has to break physical causality somewhere. It must be supernatural. Right?
> It doesn't need to be 'mind' & it doesn't need to be 'spirit' & it doesn't need to be consciousness or brahma or the abrahamic deity himself, it can simply be something which has different properties than the physical.
Not just different. In order for a physical brain to become aware of this thing, such that the brain causes muscles to vibrate air molecules and comprise our statements about this non-phulysical thing, this thing must violate that chain of physical causlity at some point. Can we agree on that? I believe even Chalmers had to bite that bullet.
> Heck, even the virtual & mathematical & informational spaces could be described as more fundamental & yet not physical or material, but nonetheless structuring & guiding the material & physical world.
I don't think they can as it would violate causality. As I think I said earlier, mathematics is actually dependent upon physics, not the other way around.
> , & I'm not trying to be antagonistic, I'm sorry if it sounds that way.
Not at all!!
It's exactly the kind of discussion I come here for. You're representing real ideas real philosophers present. In fact I think your overall argument is called Hempel's Dilemma. I just happened to think it's fallacious. Many wouldn't agree.
> I genuinely still don't understand why materialism should be the baseline assumption yet, rather than a merely agnostic stance like mine
I would argue that materialism as the more parsimonious stance is the agnostic stance. Claiming there is more ought to come with its own burden of proof — unless you want to argue that the material world doesnt exist at all.
Feeling-Picture6191 | 13 hours ago
https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/92144/solomonoffs-theory-of-induction-kolmogorov-complexity-and-bayesian-inference has some relevant discussion around the other commenter's point. It is worth reading.