A · en.wikipedia.org

• « Attributed to William of Ockham, a 14th-century English philosopher and theologian, it is frequently cited as Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, which translates as "Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity",[1][2] »
• « Libert Froidmont, in his 1649 Philosophia Christiana de Anima (On Christian Philosophy of the Soul) claimed to have coined the phrase novacula occami when he described Gregory of Rimini, one of Ockham's critics.[7] »
• « The probabilistic (Bayesian) basis for Occam's razor is elaborated by David J. C. MacKay in chapter 28 of his book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms,[36] »

A · en.wikipedia.org

• « Occam never used those exact words. »
• « the most popular version – "Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity" (Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate) – was formulated by the Irish Franciscan philosopher John Punch in his 1639 commentary on the works of Duns Scotus.[9] »

A · en.wikipedia.org

• « In philosophy, Occam's razor (also spelled Ockham's razor or Ocham's razor; Latin: novacula Occami) is the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements. »

A · en.wikipedia.org

• « History [edit]The phrase Occam's razor did not appear until a few centuries after William of Ockham's death in 1347. »
• « Formulations before William of Ockham [edit]The origins of what has come to be known as Occam's razor are traceable to the works of earlier philosophers such as John Duns Scotus (1265–1308), Robert Grosseteste (1175–1253), Maimonides (Moses ben-Maimon, 1138–1204), and even Aristotle (384–322 BC).[10][11] »

A · en.wikipedia.org

• « The philosophical razor advocates that when presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction and both hypotheses have equal explanatory power, one should prefer the hypothesis that requires the fewest assumptions,[4] and that this is not meant to be a way of choosing between hypotheses that make different predictions. »

A · en.wikipedia.org

• « The probabilistic (Bayesian) basis for Occam's razor is elaborated by David J. C. MacKay in chapter 28 of his book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms,[36] where he emphasizes that a prior bias in favor of simpler models is not required. »
• « William H. Jefferys and James O. Berger (1991) generalize and quantify the original formulation's "assumptions" concept as the degree to which a proposition is unnecessarily accommodating to possible observable data.[37] »
• « Karl Popper argues that a preference for simple theories need not appeal to practical or aesthetic considerations. Our preference for simplicity may be justified by the falsifiability criterion: we prefer simpler theories to more complex ones "because their empirical content is greater; and because they are better testable".[39] »

A · en.wikipedia.org

• « | This section may contain original research. Author of this section cites very few reliable sources, and also consistently conflates simplicity with (logical) truth. Occam's razor is not built to differentiate true hypotheses from false ones. (January 2023) | »
• « He now believes that simplicity considerations (and considerations of parsimony in particular) do not count unless they reflect something more fundamental. Philosophers, he suggests, may have made the error of hypostatizing simplicity (i.e., endowed it with a sui generis existence), when it has meaning only when »