Occam's razor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor
Testing the razor
The razor's claim that “simpler explanations are, other things being equal, generally better than more complex ones” is amenable to empirical testing. The procedure to test this hypothesis would compare the track records of simple and comparatively complex explanations. The validity of Occam's razor as a tool would then have to be rejected if the more complex explanations were more often correct than the less complex ones (while the converse would lend support to its use).
In the history of competing explanations this is certainly not the case. At least, not generally (some increases in complexity are sometimes necessary), and so there remains a justified general bias towards the simpler of two competing explanations. To understand why, consider that, for each accepted explanation of a phenomenon, there is always an infinite number of possible, more complex, and ultimately incorrect alternatives. This is so because one can always burden failing explanations with ad-hoc hypotheses. Ad-hoc hypotheses are justifications which prevent theories from being falsified. Even other empirical criteria like consilience can never truly eliminate such explanations as competition. Each true explanation, then, may have had many alternatives that were simpler and false, but also an infinite number of alternatives that were more complex and false.
Last edited by Rapid_Fire; 06-07-2011 at 02:03 PM.