1. You have been reading up on a topic, and you have to write an essay about it for homework.
2. You are reading about an unusual event and you want to know why it happened.
3. You are curious about why some people behave the way they do.
Deciding what to write about, what is important, and reaching meaningful conclusions about the causes of certain events, or coming to understand the human condition and what motivates people, are all difficult things to do.
There are so many theories, ideas, and slants. There seems to be so much information on any given topic that reaching the right conclusions rather than jumping to them is difficult, if not impossible. At any rate that’s how it must look at times.
There are ways to reach sensible conclusions, and realizing that there may not be any right answers to complex questions is one such way. There are sensible, plausible answers, but most of the time, there is rarely just the one that is absolutely correct.
The physical sciences seem to represent the closest we get to ‘right’ answers, but any scientists will tell you that what is considered correct only applies at a certain level of analysis.
Water boils at 100 degrees Centigrade, and every schoolboy knows that. A closer look at water boiling, however, reveals that only pure water boils at that temperature, and then only at sea level. Add some impurities, and try the experiment at an altitude above mean sea level and you will find that in fact, water doesn’t behave in that way.
In the mosaic of information in other subjects, much of the information actually conflicts, and we know that statistics can be manipulated to prove anything, don’t we?
A friend of mine was recently informed by a doctor that his apparent deafness was due to a spinal degeneration that was limiting the amount of blood getting to the ear. Another doctor examined him and told him he had a an ear infection from swimming in water that may not have been chlorinated enough to prevent contamination.
My friend accepted the latter diagnosis. The question is: Was he right to do that? Was he right to accept the diagnosis that he most wanted to believe?
He accepted the simplest explanation. He used the principle known as 'Occam’s razor’ to decide what to believe. He had a vested interest in so doing, and indeed, who wouldn’t want to believe the second explanation rather than the first?
Occam’s razor states that: 'One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.’
It is similar to the principle of parsimony or the principle of simplicity, which is a criterion for deciding among scientific theories or explanations.
'One should always choose the simplest explanation of a phenomenon, the one that requires the fewest leaps of logic.’
Or in other words:
'A problem should be stated in its basic and simplest terms. In science, the simplest theory that fits the facts of a problem is the one that should be selected.’
In plain language, the simplest explanation is most probably the correct one, given that all the facts have been dealt with, the logical principle put forward by William of Occam, a medieval English philosopher.
Here is a real life example of Occam’s Razor in practice. Crop circles began to be reported in the 1970s. Two interpretations were made of the circles of matted grass. The first one was that UFOs had made the imprints. The second was that someone (human) had used some sort of instruments to push down the grass.
Occam’s Razor would say that given the lack of evidence for UFOs and the complexity involved in UFOs arriving from distant galaxies, the second interpretation is the simplest and therefore the one most likely to be correct.
Of course, both explanations could have been wrong, but again, the second was by far the simplest, and so, applying the principle of Occam’s razor, would be the one most likely to be correct.
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