Simple or simplistic? Scientists' views on Occam's razor

Hauke Riesch

21 citations0/0 files storedTHEORIA An International Journal for Theory History and Foundations of Science

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Philosophy, Science, and History Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics Philosophy and History of Science

Abstract

This paper presents a discourse analysis of 30 popular science books and 40 semi-structured interviews with scientists on their views of Occam's razor and simplicity. It finds that there are many different interpretations and thoughts about the precise meaning of the principle as well as many scientists who reject it outright, or only a very limited version. In light of the variation of scientists' opinions, the paper asks what use it has as a rhetorical device and how scientists' interpretation of Occam's razor impacts on the study of popular science and affects the communication between philosophy and science.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 21 citations exist upstream.

References

1977The Essential Tension 1959The Logic of Scientific Discovery.1999Cultural boundaries of science: Credibility on the line 1994Science teaching : the role of history and philosophy of science 2003What “ideas‐about‐science” should be taught in school science? A Delphi study of the expert community 1999Towards a Paradigm for Research on Social Representations 1986Social Representations.2008From the horse's mouth: What scientists say about scientific investigation and scientific knowledge

Cited by

2014OPAQUE AND TRANSLUCENT EPISTEMIC DEPENDENCE IN COLLABORATIVE SCIENTIFIC PRACTICE 2012Indigenous Chinese HRM research: phenomena, methods, and challenges 2020Ontologically simple theories do not indicate the true nature of complex biological systems: three test cases

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.