On October 29th, 2015, Elliot Sober presented his talk entitled “Ockham’s Razors: When is a Simpler Theory Better?”. A recording of the talk is available here.
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.