Publication Date
2008
Faculty Department
Department of Philosophy and Religion
Document Type
Article
Abstract
When considering what sorts of entities we ought to believe in and what sorts of principles should guide those beliefs, a lot of attention gets paid to Ockham’s Razor. The Razor can be formulated in a number of different ways, but it is often given as the following slogan: ‘Do not multiply entities beyond necessity.’ Alex Oliver has remarked that this “Ockhamite prohibition against an overly generous ontology…seems to boil down to the rather banal exhortation not to believe in the existence of anything unless one has a reason to so believe.” I am not concerned with whether or not the Razor is banal, but I am concerned with whether or not it – when interpreted not as an imperative but as a normative claim – is true. In this paper I wish to consider one sort of objection that is often leveled against Ockham’s Razor and argue that there is at least one substantial version of this principle – one closely related to Oliver’s ‘banal exhortation’ – that is true and immune to the objection. Furthermore, I will explain how this principle, while both substantial and true, should also be seen as being ultimately hollow, or vacuous.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
“The Hollow Truth of Ockham’s Razor,” in P. Hanna (ed.) An Anthology of Philosophical Studies (Athens: ATINER, 2008). [ISBN: 978-960-6672-38-5]
