Ockham Quotes

The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct.

With all things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one.

Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.

All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one.

Ockham's disposable razors

Keep things simple.

It is futile to do with more what can be done with fewer.

When you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better.

It is only rather recently that science has begun to make peace with its magical roots. Until a few decades ago, it was common for histories of science either to commence decorously with Copernicus's heliocentric theory or to laud the rationalism of Aristotelian antiquity and then to leap across the Middle Ages as an age of ignorance and superstition. One could, with care and diligence, find occasional things to praise in the works of Avicenna, William of Ockham, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon, but these sparse gems had to be thoroughly dusted down and scraped clean of unsightly accretions before being inserted into the corners of a frame fashioned in a much later period.

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

But a question needs to be asked, a basic logical scientific question. It is simply this, has anyone applied Ockham's Razor to the question yet?

Communism is Christianity castrated by Ockham`s Razor.

...the razor of Ockham is clean and decisive.

Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate. (Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.)

La navaja de Ockham... La explicación más sencilla suele ser la correcta.

Add to that the age-old principle of Ockham’s razor in problem-solving: “If there are a number of possible solutions, the simplest one, based on the fewest assumptions, is most likely to be correct.

Most people oversimplify Occam’s razor to mean the simplest answer is usually correct. But the real meaning, what the Franciscan friar William of Ockham really wanted to emphasize, is that you shouldn’t complicate, that you shouldn’t “stack” a theory if a simpler explanation was at the ready. Pare it down. Prune the excess.

Ockham snorted. "I am no nominalist. The problem with teaching the Modern Way is that lesser scholars, excited by the novelty, seldom bother to master my insights. There are lips on which I heartily wish my name had never rested. I tell you, Dietl, a man becomes a heretic less for what he writes than for what others believe he has written.

Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate [Plurality must never be posited without necessity]

Plurality is never to be posited without necessity.

Indeed, Ockham stated that it cannot be strictly proved that god, if defined as a being who possesses the qualities of supremacy, perfection, uniqueness, and infinity, exists at all. However, if one intends to identify a first cause of the existence of the world, one may choose to call that “god” even if one does not know the precise nature of the first cause.

It is known in the West as Ockham’s Razor, but Indian philosophers call it the Principle of Lightness, for it dictates that we choose the ‘lighter’ of two competing theories. The Principle of Lightness may be stated as follows: given two competing theories, each of which is equally good at explaining and predicting the relevant phenomena, choose the lighter theory, that is, the theory that posits the least number of unobservable entities.

The years between Roger Bacon’s birth, in 1220, and Uthred’s death, in 1370, are considered the final flowering of the Middle Ages. They were followed by a longer, grimmer period in Europe, during which the machinery for rooting out heresy defeated enlightened discourse almost completely. The early condemnation of works by William Ockham, Johannes Eckehart, the spiritual Franciscans, and Dante signaled the start of a breakdown in the integrity of Western thought. During this Great Interruption, xenophobia replaced curiosity, interest in Islam and the classics withered, and Muslim thought was anathematized or ignored. Fifty years later, it was no longer wise to learn Arabic, Hebrew, or even Greek.

Hobbes tells us that war consists not in Battle only, but in that tract of time wherein the Will to Battle is so manifest that, scenting bloodlust in his fellows and himself, Man can no longer trust civilization’s pledge to keep the peace. If so, we are at war. We have been these four months, since Ockham’s arrest and Sniper’s bullet revealed too much truth for trust to stay. But we do not know how to turn the Will to Battle into Battle. We have enjoyed three hundred years of peace, World Peace, real peace, whatever the detractors say. This generation has never met a man who met a man who marched onto a battlefield. Governments have no armies anymore, no arms. A man may kill another with a gun, a sword, a sharpened stone, but the human race no longer remembers how to turn a child of eighteen into a soldier, organize riot into battle lines, or dehumanize an enemy enough to make the killing bearable.

Ever since William of Ockham,119 scientists and philosophers have preferred simpler, more compact explanations over longer, more complex ones. For example, suppose you came home one day and your pool smelled like baboons. Would it make more sense to assume that an international crime organization put drops of baboon perfume in your pool as part of a complicated heist involving Justin Bieber and three professional basketball players, or would it make more sense to simply assume your pet baboon disobeyed your order and jumped in the pool to cool off?

William of Ockham’s principle: Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.

Plurality should not be assumed without necessity

Ockham stood so calmly through the outburst, watching hysteria drain the color from Carlyle's face. It made me think of Alexander, of his force, the human thunder of our Mediterranean sweeping through deserts, through empires, but India, calm, mighty India, fears nothing.

Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora [It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer]

navaja de Ockham:

This is the Ockham’s razor principle: always assume the simplest explanation.

idea of Occam’s razor, a rule of thumb in problem-solving that recommends a preference for simplicity. When choosing between alternative explanations or solutions to a problem, embrace the less complicated: it will probably be more accurate than an intricate or elaborate answer with lots of parts. The idea was set forth (in a somewhat different form) by the English friar William of Ockham in the fourteenth century; the “razor” is to shave away the unnecessary to focus on the essential.

It is futile to do with more things, that which can be done with less.

It’s been five centuries since Da Vinci defined perfection as when there is nothing left to take away; seven centuries since William of Ockham noted that it is “in vain to do with more what can be done with less,” and two and a half millennia since Lao Tzu advised: “To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day.

What Ockham’s razor says is that when faced with two theories, when the available data cannot distinguish between them, we should study in depth the simplest of the theories.

That is the background to the principle of explanation associated with his name: ‘Ockham’s Razor’. It calls for economy in explanation, avoiding the introduction of unnecessary entities or terms. Sharing with other nominalists the belief that ‘it is futile to work with more entities when it is possible to work with fewer’, Ockham argued that ‘a plurality must not be asserted without necessity’. And, with more than a little sarcasm, he used his ‘razor’ to remove Aristotle’s ‘final causes’:

Ockham’s razor. The simplest explanation was usually correct. They

Know what you know. Most people oversimplify Occam’s razor to mean the simplest answer is usually correct. But the real meaning, what the Franciscan friar William of Ockham really wanted to emphasize, is that you shouldn’t complicate, that you shouldn’t “stack” a theory if a simpler explanation was at the ready. Pare it down. Prune the excess. Andrew

principio de la navaja de Ockham.

This is one of nature's lessons for innovable technologies: If we want to open nature's black box of innovation, Ockham's razor is much too dull. Like oil and water, simplicity and innovability don't mix.

According to the standard reading of the Organon, Aristotle holds that there are ten categories of existing things as follows: substance, quality, quantity, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and passion. According to Ockham’s reading, however, Aristotle holds that there are only two categories of existing things: substance and quality. Ockham bases his interpretation on the thesis that only substances and qualities have real essence definitions signifying things composed of matter and form. The other eight categories signify a substance or a quality while connoting something else. They therefore have nominal essence definitions, meaning that they are not existing things.

Ockham’s defence of both natural rights and the limitations of human reason sprang from his belief in the omnipresence of God’s freedom. If we were to put this defence in contemporary scientific terms, we might say that Ockham took up his stand on the principle of indeterminacy. He would have welcomed evidence of a ‘big bang’ at the beginning of things and the difficulty of capturing space-time in a single, unified theory. In our time, freedom has moved cosmology beyond a mechanistic model of the universe.

Ockham’s Razor – the principle that the best explanation is one that does not multiply assumptions needlessly

Ockham’s Razor – the principle that the best explanation is one that does not multiply assumptions needlessly – took its toll of confidence in Aristotle’s physical theory.

The golden rule introduced a principle of justice which overthrew the assumption of natural inequality. And, in Ockham’s eyes, that move is at the heart of Christian revelation. It is God’s will.

Locke’s conclusion was startling, not to say world shattering. A monarch like Louis XIV, or any of his would-be imitators, in effect is at war with his subjects.§ When that happens, Locke asserted, then lawful government is at an end. We are all thrown back into the original state of nature. “Where the government is dissolved,” Locke explained, “the people are at liberty to provide for themselves, by erecting a new legislative” body to act in their name.38 The social contract starts over from scratch. Government by popular consent is not just a good idea, as it was for Aristotle and Ockham. For Locke, it is an inescapable law of nature. It is what separates a society of free men from a society of slaves.

The universal Church touched every corner of western Europe and practically all aspects of life from politics to market behavior, but it was not a monolithic institution. Very much the opposite: Because it channeled and encompassed practically all spiritual life, the Church, by necessity, had to be a big tent. It contained multitudes: poor, illiterate priests in isolated rural parishes with secret wives and broods of children, who rarely saw their uninterested parishioners; charismatic Dominican preachers capable of attracting crowds of thousands in towns and cities; places like the brand-new castle church of Wittenberg, built in Renaissance style and packed with holy relics in expensive gilded cases; towering Gothic cathedrals, already centuries old, dominating the skylines of the continent’s prosperous urban centers and serving as headquarters for rich, powerful bishops who pulled political strings from London to Leipzig; leaky-roofed monasteries, housed by a few elderly monks in threadbare robes begging for donations to fix a tumbledown refectory; university theologians steeped in the brutally dense works of Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham who spent their time teaching students and arguing about scholastic philosophy; devout laywomen, reading books of hours in the privacy of their prosperous homes; sword-swinging Hospitaller Knights, soldier-monks in armor and black habits, beheading Muslim sailors on the decks of galleys under a blue Mediterranean sky. The Church was all of these things: corrupt and saintly, worldly and mystical, impossibly wealthy and desperately impoverished.

Theresa May took this aversion to thinking to its apotheosis when she declared that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ shortly after becoming prime minister in July 2016. Even by the standards of modern British politics, this is a slogan of such sweeping vacuity that it beggars belief that she could utter the words with a straight face. Ask yourself now what it actually means. Consider the events of the following months and years and ask yourself whether she could have been doing anything other than using it to discourage thinking, to avoid facts and to postpone reality. You don’t need to be William of Ockham to conclude that this is the only – never mind the simplest – explanation for her choice of words. The truly nasty element of the whole enterprise is the way it treats the Brexit-supporting British public as idiots. Throw them a fatuous soundbite, the thinking goes, and they’ll be so busy chomping away on it that they won’t notice we haven’t got the first idea what Brexit is going to mean.

If Ockham Saneer told me that my death would save ten thousand lives," Quarrimann interrupted flatly, "I'd let them kill me. Would you?

Omnis homo praeter Sortem currit, igitur Plato currit et sic de aliis a Sorte.

To avoid mental traps, you must think more objectively. Try arguing from first principles, getting to root causes, and seeking out the third story. Realize that your intuitive interpretations of the world can often be wrong due to availability bias, fundamental attribution error, optimistic probability bias, and other related mental models that explain common errors in thinking. Use Ockham’s razor and Hanlon’s razor to begin investigating the simplest objective explanations. Then test your theories by de-risking your assumptions, avoiding premature optimization. Attempt to think gray in an effort to consistently avoid confirmation bias. Actively seek out other perspectives by including the Devil’s advocate position and bypassing the filter bubble. Consider the adage “You are what you eat.” You need to take in a variety of foods to be a healthy person. Likewise, taking in a variety of perspectives will help you become a super thinker.

Ockham’s razor helps here. It advises that the simplest explanation is most likely to be true.

As it would crop up so often during the outpouring of one of Christina’s convulsiving tirades of out-of-touch cross-examining razor manias in the Ockham style school of thought, someone would be damn fool enough to interject a thought disrupting her. Whereupon she would turn her head and politely respond, “Do you mind, I’m not through being evil yet,” and logicalmly carry on with giving them generous shafty portions of her mind pieces, unhasped and undisturbed by extenuating circumstances. She had heard in old Europe certain warrior tribes weaned their children by presenting them with food on the tip of a sword, a good custom she continued in spirit. --Christina Brickley, The Lady and the Samurai

Two years later the logic of the struggle led (Pope) John XXII to excommunicate William of Ockham, the English Franciscan, known for his forceful reasoning as “the invincible doctor.” In expounding a philosophy called “nominalism,” Ockham opened a dangerous door to direct intuitive knowledge of the physical world. He was in a sense a spokesman for intellectual freedom, and the Pope recognized the implications by his ban. In reply to the excommunication, Ockham promptly charged John XXII with seventy errors and seven heresies.

In the last dark age, one can search the inquiries of this era's preserved of thinkers from Augustine to Ockham, and fail to discover a single page of criticism of the established social framework, however rationally insupportable feudal bondage, absolute paternalism, divine right of kings and the rest may be. In the current final order, is it so different? Can we see in any media or even university press a paragraph of clear unmasking of a global regime that condemns a third of all children to malnutrition with more food than enough available? In such a social order, thought becomes indistinguishable from propaganda. Only one doctrine is speakable, and a priest caste of its experts prescribes the necessities and obligations to all. Social consciousness is incarcerated within the role of a kind of ceremonial logic, operating entirely within the received framework of an exhaustively prescribed regulatory apparatus protecting the privileges of the privileged. Methodical censorship triumphs in the guise of scholarly rigor, and the only room left for searching thought becomes the game of competing rationalizations.

Cesena asserted that it was perfectly orthodox to teach that Jesus and the apostles owned nothing as their own. So why should his successors not do the same? The pope, for reasons obvious to any visitor to Rome or the sumptuous papal palace at Avignon, thought this a dangerous heresy and innovation. Cesena wanted to know, what did Brother William think? Ockham promised to look into the matter and get back to him. When he returned with his answer, he stunned both the pope and Cesena. There was no doubt, Ockham concluded, that the doctrine of apostolic poverty was sound. To Ockham, this was not a matter just of theology and belief, that realm “up there” in which the man of science avoids involving himself.

Cesena was delighted. Then his smile vanished. It was all too easy to imagine the pope’s reaction when news of Ockham’s opinion leaked

That night, on May 26, 1328, Ockham, Cesena, and another Franciscan companion slipped out of their rooms, mounted horses, and lit out of Avignon for the border. The trio did not stop until they crossed into Bavaria, where the Holy Roman Emperor Ludwig IV was engaged in his own dispute with the pope. They met in Munich, where according to legend William of Ockham said to the emperor, “Defend me with your sword, and I will defend you with my pen.” Ludwig accepted the

But with his usual incisive skill, Ockham cut to the heart of the matter with a simple but significant question: Why does the papacy exist in the first place? The answer came to him from reading Aristotle’s Politics, where Aristotle asserts that a ruler, any ruler, must promote and defend the welfare of all those subject to his rule. Clearly the same obligation applied to the pope. This was why Christ had told Saint Peter, “Feed my sheep” (John 21:17). As shepherd of Christ’s flock, Ockham wrote in late 1339, the pope “has authority from God only for preserving, not for destroying” the Catholic Church and faith.18

Pope John XXII, of course, had read “Feed my sheep” very differently. Like Boniface, he saw it as enshrining papal authority over the sheep of secular society, including its secular rulers. So William of Ockham proceeded to take his famous razor to Boniface’s arguments. The pope had no such plenitude of power, Ockham replied; the faithful are neither sheep nor slaves. Nor are there two swords, as Boniface had claimed. There is only one, the one that kings and magistrates use to govern and protect their subjects. In fact, Christ had specifically forbidden his apostles from exercising the same kind of authority over the faithful that kings exercised over subjects (Matthew 20:25–27).20 By claiming broad authority, as Boniface had done, popes had in effect turned their office into an illegitimate enterprise.

To understand this it must first be known that the power of making human laws and rights was first and principally in the people,” Ockham wrote in 1328, “and hence the people transferred the power of making the law to the emperor,” or whomever else they choose to exercise authority over them.21 All mortals who are born free have the power voluntarily to put a ruler over themselves, including the Church and the pope. But the final power remained with the people. So having put the pope in office, the people were now free to end “his raging tyranny over the faithful” and push him out.

For centuries, however, it was the supreme pontiff who called church councils into existence and ordered them to carry out the papal agenda, as part of his “fullness of power” over the Church. Certainly no bishop or abbot or professor of theology who attended one had ever thought of himself as an elected representative of the faithful, let alone as empowered to depose a pope if he felt so inclined. Yet that was exactly what William of Ockham claimed they were empowered to do. Council members were ex officio intermediaries between the faithful and the pope, acting on behalf of the body of the Church to protect it from harm.

Aristotle had become so indispensable to the life of the European mind that it seemed impossible he could ever be yanked out. However, what the medieval mind gained in certainty, it gave up in terms of curiosity and innovation. The study of nature was reduced to a science of final causes, and the last word on that subject, as on all subjects, was Aristotle, now dead for one thousand years. Imagination and creativity fled. The Aristotelian empirical spirit of Ockham and Roger Bacon was replaced by the dead letter of Aristotle himself.

In fact, there was no other kind of righteousness except through God.5 If that was true, then why had everyone else, including centuries of theologians, gotten it so wrong? How had the Church, after being founded on that rock of faith, gotten so far off track? Suddenly, Martin Luther thought he knew. Sitting on his bookshelf were the works of Aristotle and his scholastic followers: William of Ockham, Duns Scotus, and Luther’s own mentor Gabriel Biel. These were the vaunted intellectual giants of the medieval Church. He himself had taught their ideas for years, along with the works of Aristotle. Indeed, as Martin Luther would write later, “I have read [Aristotle] and studied him with more understanding than did Saint Thomas Aquinas or Duns Scotus.”6 However, by adopting Aristotle’s view of man and nature, the Church’s leading spokesmen had set that institution down the wrong path for centuries.

I’ve just employed Ockham’s razor, the most useful philosophical discovery of the fourteenth century. It’s also one of the most important for the future of the Western mind.

Why use two (or more) when one (or fewer) will do, is the principle that William of Ockham introduced into the medieval thought process. It grew out of his refinement of Aristotle’s logic and set off a revolution not only in philosophy, but in politics and religion. Before he died, Ockham’s razor would undercut the foundations of the medieval Church.

That cannot be said of William of Ockham. Born a few years before Bacon’s death in 1294, he carried the Aristotelian legacy of the Oxford Franciscans into direct conflict with the Church’s most powerful figure, the pope himself.

Far more than Thomas Aquinas or even Bacon, Ockham is the true forerunner of the modern era.

No, Ockham concluded, there is no common nature shared by individual dogs or men that we call by a common name. No universal exists outside the mind; everything that is real exists only as individuals. When I say, “All men are mortal,” this is shorthand for saying, “Socrates is mortal,” “Plato is mortal,” and so on.

Ockham didn’t use the term fiction to suggest that what we say about the world isn’t true; just the opposite. Science deals with real life; and logic is the language of science. But we shouldn’t mistake the logical gymnastics going on inside our heads for the reality going on outside. Science is about real things; logic, surprisingly perhaps, is not.

A century after Pisa, the monarchies that had used the arguments of Ockham and the conciliarists to beat the Catholic Church into submission would end up having the very same arguments used against them. A full-fledged theory of popular sovereignty broke surface for the first time in the sixteenth century in the writings of Almain and his colleague John Mair and then more explosively during the Reformation. It resurfaced again in the seventeenth century in authors like John Locke.

If these words have a familiar sound, it is because they are not from Ockham or Gerson, but from Thomas Jefferson. They come from the most influential summary of medieval conciliarist doctrine in its secular form: the American Declaration of Independence.

It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.

This sounds very Stoic. But Antisthenes took his Cynic doctrines to the next radical step. He rejected any and all social conventions, including all forms of property and government. He also violently turned his back on Plato’s theology and even more violently his theory of Forms. “A horse I see,” Antisthenes is supposed to have exclaimed, “but not horseness”: words that would echo in the works of the medieval philosopher William of Ockham.

Ockham's razor is only a methodological principle, not a necessary truth

Ockham’s razor helps here. It advises that the simplest explanation is most likely to be true. When you encounter competing explanations that plausibly explain a set of data equally well, you probably want to choose the simplest one to investigate first.

Ockham spent much of his time trying to convince his colleagues by various ingenious means that interpretations such as 1 and 2 are dangerous, unreasonable and send philosophy into nonsense, and that interpretations such as 3 and 4 are more rational.

Ockham and Aristotle were of one mind in their basic attitudes toward human cognition: all knowledge, they believed, arises from experience.

Aristotle and most mediaeval philosophers were thus direct realists, believing that we sense, usually directly and unproblematically, the external world around us.

you can’t necessarily reason from the existence of universal concepts in thought and language to universal realities in the world that those concepts are about.

..et tamen nihil est sciens vel quiescens, nisi actualiter sit sciens vel quiescens.