From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org] Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2002 10:15 AM To: alt.atheism.moderated Subject: Re: The psychology of Atheism Jim Humphries wrote: > > > it is never the case that of explanations > > > with equal explanatory power, equal logical consistency, and > > > equal consistency with other truths, the most parsimonious is > > > NOT the one considered correct or true. > > > this is false, since we know that people > do sometimes opt for the less parsimonious explanation. I defy you to present a single example of such a case. Surely you can see a few moves ahead here, and realize that for any such case I can argue one of a) unequal explanatory power, b) unequal logical consistency, or c) unequal consistency with other truths. > But note that it is not a matter of what people > 'consider'- it is a matter of whether the simpler > explanation is invariably true My principle can only help us decide what at any given moment we should consider to be true. I of course have no technique for guaranteeing that a belief in a synthetic proposition could never be shown by subsequent evidence to be mistaken. Nor do you. > >> without this principle, we cannot > >> choose correctly among all the infinitely many possible > >> explanations that have varying complexity but equal explanatory > >> power, equal logical consistency, and equal consistency with > >> other truths. > > > In fact there are many other criteria- See Newton- Smith's book > for an extended discussion of the different criteria ( about 10). I doubt you can give a single such criterion that isn't equivalent to or a specialization of the above principle. -- brian@holtz.org http://humanknowledge.net