William of Ockham (1285-1347) - medieval English philosopher. Like many other intellectuals of his era, this man belonged to the spiritual class and made a great contribution to the development of not only theology, but also philosophy. The most famous is the philosophical methodological principle formulated by him called "Occam's razor".
The short formulation of the principle known as "Occam's razor" is: "Entities should not be multiplied unless absolutely necessary." This methodological principle is called a razor because it involves cutting off unnecessary arguments and explanations in any reasoning.
History and essence of Occam's razor
It should not be thought that such a principle did not exist before William of Ockham. Even in ancient philosophy, it was known as the logical law of sufficient reason, but Ockham gave the clearest formulation of it.
Other names for this rule are the basis of methodological reductionism, the principle of frugality, the principle of simplicity, or the law of economy. The rule assumes that no additional concepts or causal relationships should be introduced where everything can be explained in the available ways. It should be understood that we are not talking about quantity, but about quality: no one claims that there should not be many entities - it is necessary to avoid unnecessary entities. Explaining a phenomenon can be complex, but it should not become artificially complicated.
Occam's razor examples
Those who forget about Occam's razor more often than not are fans of reports of UFOs and other anomalous phenomena. Here is a simple example: in a certain city, many people observed an unidentified flying object. It could be a large meteorite, a detached rocket stage, a meteorological probe, or even a cloud of an unusual shape, but ufologists are in a hurry to conclude that it was an alien spacecraft. In other words, to explain the phenomenon, an additional entity is introduced, the presence of which in the Universe has not even been scientifically proven, although the phenomenon may well be explained by long-known earthly causes.
Occam's razor is very successful in dealing with conspiracy theories. Here are two statements: "Lack of evidence means the government is hiding it" and "Lack of evidence means this phenomenon does not exist." The second statement does not contain unnecessary entities, the first does not stand up to Occam's razor.
This principle plays an important role in the development of science, thanks to it, untenable hypotheses are refuted. For example, A. Einstein, having formulated the general theory of relativity, proved that the world ether does not manifest itself in any way, therefore, this is an unnecessary hypothesis. More science did not return to the idea of the world ether.
