“That’s Occam’s razor, not Science. The scientific method >is taken to suggest< that an untestable theory is of no use.”
Watch that passive voice—unless you’re going to actually claim that the scientific method suggests that, I don’t care what someone somewhere took it to suggest.
The scientific method doesn’t suggest anything. It’s a method, not a philosophy. As a method, it gives you steps to follow. A hypothesis is untestable; a theory’s been tested. A model integrates theories. MW is a model.
“What’s more, Occam’s razor isn’t some unmutable natural law: it’s just a probability—the simplest explanation is >usually< the right one, and so why not start there and move up the ladder of complexity as required: that way, you can cover the most likely (all other aspects being equal) explanations with the minimum amount of work.”
Occam’s razor is part of science, not to be distinguished from the rest. Without it, there’s absolutely no way to distinguish experimental results from lab noise—without it the “best explanation” for an unexpected but reproduced experimental result might be “sorry, I must have messed something up, and the guy attempting to reproduce my results must have messed the same thing up in the same way to get the same result.”
You’re right that it has to be applied as a rule of thumb, but it’s also fundamental to science as a reductionist pursuit.
“That’s Occam’s razor, not Science. The scientific method >is taken to suggest< that an untestable theory is of no use.”
Watch that passive voice—unless you’re going to actually claim that the scientific method suggests that, I don’t care what someone somewhere took it to suggest.
The scientific method doesn’t suggest anything. It’s a method, not a philosophy. As a method, it gives you steps to follow. A hypothesis is untestable; a theory’s been tested. A model integrates theories. MW is a model.
“What’s more, Occam’s razor isn’t some unmutable natural law: it’s just a probability—the simplest explanation is >usually< the right one, and so why not start there and move up the ladder of complexity as required: that way, you can cover the most likely (all other aspects being equal) explanations with the minimum amount of work.”
Occam’s razor is part of science, not to be distinguished from the rest. Without it, there’s absolutely no way to distinguish experimental results from lab noise—without it the “best explanation” for an unexpected but reproduced experimental result might be “sorry, I must have messed something up, and the guy attempting to reproduce my results must have messed the same thing up in the same way to get the same result.”
You’re right that it has to be applied as a rule of thumb, but it’s also fundamental to science as a reductionist pursuit.