Can a thing be simple under one definition of simplicity and not simple under another? The contemporary philosopher Karl R. Popper (1902– 1994) has said that Occam’s razor is without sense, since there is no objective criterion for simplicity. Popper states that every such proposed criterion will necessarily be biased and subjective.
There’s no citation. There’s one Popper book in the references section, LScD, but it doesn’t contain the string “occam” (case insensitive search).
I also searched a whole folder of many Popper books and found nothing mentioning Occam (except it’s mentioned by other people, not Popper, in the Schlipp volumes).
If Popper actually said something about Occam’s razor, I’d like to read it. Any idea what’s going on? This seems like a scholarship problem from Li and Vitanyi. They also dismiss Popper’s solution to the problem of induction as unsatisfactory, with no explanation, argument, cite, etc.
Chapter 7 of LScD is about simplicity, but he does not express there the views that Li and Vitanyi attribute to him. Perhaps he said such things elsewhere, but in LScD he presents his view of simplicity as degree of falsifiability. The main difference I see between Popper and Li-Vitanyi is that Popper did not have the background to look for a mathematical formulation of his ideas.
Li and Vitanyi write:
There’s no citation. There’s one Popper book in the references section, LScD, but it doesn’t contain the string “occam” (case insensitive search).
I also searched a whole folder of many Popper books and found nothing mentioning Occam (except it’s mentioned by other people, not Popper, in the Schlipp volumes).
If Popper actually said something about Occam’s razor, I’d like to read it. Any idea what’s going on? This seems like a scholarship problem from Li and Vitanyi. They also dismiss Popper’s solution to the problem of induction as unsatisfactory, with no explanation, argument, cite, etc.
Chapter 7 of LScD is about simplicity, but he does not express there the views that Li and Vitanyi attribute to him. Perhaps he said such things elsewhere, but in LScD he presents his view of simplicity as degree of falsifiability. The main difference I see between Popper and Li-Vitanyi is that Popper did not have the background to look for a mathematical formulation of his ideas.
Try searching “parsimony” maybe? Another way to express Occam.