Elliot Sober

"Ockham's Razors: When is a Simpler theory Better?"

Elliott Sober, October 29, 2015

Professor Elliott Sober will give a talk entitled "Ockham's Razors: When is a Simpler theory Better?" on Thursday, October 29th at 7 PM, in 180 Science Hall. Here is a brief overview of his talk:

Ockham's Razor, the principle of parsimony, states that simpler theories are better than theories that are more complex. It is obvious that simpler theories are beautiful and easy to understand; the hard problem is to figure out why the simplicity of a theory is relevant to deciding what the world is like. In this talk Professor Sober will describe two "parsimony paradigms" within which this problem can be solved.