No it doesn't. Example: Occam's razor said that by all available evidence Newtonian physics was right. Only when new evidence became available (through improving technology) were Einstein et al able to show that Newtonian physics is only a special case of a wider law.

Correct. I didn't say Occam's razor is the sole definer: the other side of the equation is if your model has been falsified.

But given two competing unfalsified theories, what we call "true" is given by simplicity considerations. This falls out naturally from Karl Poppers framework in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, and I draw out that logical argument here. This is something Popper puts forward indirectly himself.

Clarification: it doesn't solely define truth, it helps define truth given other constraints (like falsification)

Then doesnt that mean it is simply a more effective guide towards truth?

I thought that was the whole point behind a Razor.

I always feel it isn't quite right to say that Newtonian physics is wrong.

Yes it's true that it is a case within the more general theory; but, in a way, you can always say this is likely true of even the new wider case theory. You will never be able to say you are sure there aren't exceptions, new cases, wider more general laws, than the ones we arrive at through scientific method. It is a baseline assumption of science that such is the case at all times.

And did Newtonian physics ever claim to be universally functional in all conditions and places? It was derived for use terrestrially. It continues to work for that. The evidences found still hold true. Only a fool would have claimed they knew it would work outside of the known realm of it's usage and verification. No theory is absolute. The universe has no objective truth to it, only one that has relative mechanisms and one that describes things in a way that is useful within certain conditions.

Do we likewise refute that solid objects don't exist? In broader theory, solid is an illusion. It is only electromagnetism that prevents your hand from moving straight through a tabletop. Not "physical contact." And yet we can also accept that this is just what is meant by physical contact. It is a construct of desciption developed and still used because it is the functional way for us to view it.

I'm a mechanical engineer by trade. What I can tell you is that no one stopped using Newtonian physics. Nobody uses anything else to design things today. It's still fully correct. In fact, using relativity and/or quantum mechanics would be a worse solution. It would be bulky, less intuitive, therefore stifling ease of innovation or fluidity of discretionary usages, and lead to higher frequency of errors, reducing the quality of the final product.

So does Occams not work? Rather it did. It was right. It is irrelevant that you can dig deeper and produce a more general solution. The correct solution today is to still use Newtonian physics for everything terrestrial. A careful follower of science would have never claimed it was any good for anything beyond those boundaries. The truly wonderful thing about science is it literally cannot be wrong. Only a person's interpretation can be wrong. Science never claims to know what it doesn't know. People do. Science never said there wasn't going to be more to it, or that Newtonian physics would work elsewhere. It can't have done as no evidence or experiments showed such. Once we tried, we found the evidence, which is why we then produced new theories.

The article directly backs what I say. Perhaps there is confusion here though. The astronomy example in the article is the opposite of the newtonian example. In that one, while the old model can still produce results, it is clunky. The new model simplifies and provides for cleaner usage. The reverse is true for Newtonian physics. It isn't old stubbornness; we will never stop using newtonian physics as we do because it remains superior. It always will be. It is the true way to go about it.

Again the article backs this. At the end of the day, just like we arrived at what we say and call fact that the planets orbit the sun, we will always say and call fact the obvious functional description of newtonian physics. Just like we will continue to talk about solid objects, even though they don't actually exist.

That framing makes it sound like the truth is out there, and the razor points at it. But rather, reality can be modeled by many combination of logical statements—and we use the razor to select one we call the true one.

Truth is a consequence of us deciding on a set of unfalsified "empirical statements" arranged in a certain way, and one of our requirements is simplicity

Thinking on this topic I've landed at this thought that truth, as we try to define it, doesn't exist. Epistemic uncertainty is always possible. The greatest minds in logic and epistemology tried to solve it and arrived effectively at a stalemate. In physics, we end up with uncertainty as a fact as well. In a nutshell, when you get down to a fine enough view, the act of observation becomes relatively large to the observation, enough so that the act of observing impacts the results, making a true observation simply impossible. These dilemmas, I reckon, don't have solutions. There isn't a new thought, method or technology that will fix it. It is impossible.

Yet occams then gives us a new definition of truth. Perhaps our old idea of it simply doesn't exist. It's not that we haven't found the truth; but, that the truth doesn't exist. The razor doesn't point at the truth. It points at function. Truth then is functionality. Which shows true in everything.

Take consciousness, the problem of the other, and all the metaphysical models. Like these topics, I feel we cannot find those answers. And I reckon occams is a decent compass there too. We can find "truth" in the absence of such a thing (as we like to think of it) by focusing on functionality.

Just some random thoughts. What you said was interesting and got me thinking this.

Hmmm, we use the razor to eliminate false ideas quickly. It doesnt actually assist in selection so much as it narrows down criteria that we might otherwise spend time verifying. Like all ideas, this has advantages and disadvantages. The Razor is not always true, some things are naturally complex and oversimplification can cause problems.

Truth has to do with alignment, specifically being aligned with actuality: what is actually there, and not just an idea. The complexity of that alignment isnt really a factor in the truth, but it is certainly a matter of how we relate the truth.

I disagree. Truth exists, but it get complicated when we add levels of consciousness and conceptual purity to the mix. If objective reality exists, then so does truth.

Almost complete change of subject, but I don't see Popper as unsullied by Kuhn et al's work.

Is reality exists then truth exists, so it depends on whether you (the observer) thinks reality exists or not.

While uncertainty in physics is a fact, it could be that this reveals more about the state of human knowledge than it does what’s seen as uncertain.

The act of observing at the smallest of scales is accomplished by interfering, so it very may well be that the interference is what is impacting results. I won’t say what is possible or impossible with regards to future technology because what we have today was considered impossible not that long ago. These dilemmas currently do not have solutions.

But what if objective reality, for what that actually means and entails to us, doesn't exist in truth? Yet I'd suggest it does in function.

I feel like because of our use of language and inherent ideas, it goes both ways. I could not agree more in the sense that I have profusely expressed that objective reality exists many many times. I still stand by those statements; but, I think I may be using the same words in two different ways.

Some kind of objective reality must exist. Clearly. Yet it is our description that functions. We don't feel we've found the answers, or have the facts, positive statements that express more than nothing, simply by knowing objective reality exists. This, by itself, is useless. True. Yet it means very little until we form a description of that reality. That description is what we then say is truth.

Yet none of our descriptions of it are provably true. More than that. What I'm suggesting is that we can never prove the descriptions. Our descriptions aren't true by this nature. What is logically true is only that there is something. Not what it is; yet, we can still know the function of our descriptions quite well.

When we think about the recursion, aren't any of our descriptions that we seek to call truth only sensible if we place them within the psychological constructs of our minds? Would our ideas mean something to anything else other than ourselves? Would something else conscious that has no use, no emotional attachment or curiosity towards, a specific construct, be able to understand what our truth means when that specific construct is pivotal to our truth? And yet a truth, objective reality, wants to say we should have agreement, in that it is the truth.

Perhaps we can say truth exists in different ways. Bare logic gives us one, which is what yields that objective reality exists. Maybe occams gives us another form of truth, one that is useful when the other form of truth isn't?

It isn't true that x description is an undeniable universally understood (beyond just humans) objectively accurate description. It is true that all we can know is that x description yields y result/functionality. It is true that yielding our description to that functionality provides the same kind of direction we seek from our concept of truth, the same sense as if it were objectively accurate in some universal way.

That's kind of getting at my thesis: in science, nothing is ever really there. All we have is the ability to falsify statements given some basic statements we make given sensory information.

There are a vast number of statements we can make that would be unfalsified by sense statements: what we call true are the theories and models that have highest potential for falsification. Because of some set theory assumptions I make in the article, the models with the highest potential for falsification are the simplest ones! (Out of a set of as-yet unfalsified theories)

You mention verification — verification of empirical statements actually isn't possible! Because of problems with induction explored by Hume, Popper, etc where induction on empirical statements uses circular logic.

This is why science deals only with falsification!

Not at all! They jive together very well

Occam's Razor says only that simpler explanations are to be preferred to more complex ones, because complexity often arises from people using motivated reasoning to plug holes in their pet theory rather than admitting that it is probably wrong. But it's not some law of nature that the simplest explanation is always right. We say the planets revolve around the sun because they do, and Occam's Razor pointed towards that, but special relativity is more complex than Newtonian physics, creationism is simpler than evolution, etc.

My point is that we could have made an overly complex theory that perfectly models our solar system geocentrically. In the extreme case, imagine we used a neural net fed with geocentric images—this model could have millions of parameters and perform predictions perfectly. However we wouldn't call this model true because it's not simple. The truth is always at the edge of what is unfalsified and what is simplest, by convention

I mean, we would have used the simpler model because it would be more useful, but if in the fullness of time space telescopes had allowed us to see that the geocentric model was correct, we would have still called it true. That is, you have cherry picked an example where Occam's Razor correctly pointed us to the truth, but that doesn't prove much.

The article proves the use of Occam's Razor for truth in the general case: when picking between unfalsified models where one has a subset of the other's parameters. It's a short set theoretic argument

If the statements are empirical, (based in fact, fact being credible data, data being information gained by direct observation) and scientific (based on logic which can be experimented on repeatedly with predictable outcome) then it absolutely may be verified. The best context for this depends on your intention.

Science deals with the act of falsifying, however it also accepts things which have not, or are not easily falsified, as building blocks.

We know Einsteins theory of time dilation based on speed to be true, because we tried GPS without it and it failed drastically within seconds. Once we plugged in the equation, we got GPS.

Verification of general principles needs us to go through for every instance of an event and check that it's true! The idea is that any theory we've got is only assumed generalizable until falsified, it can't be *true* for every domain for all time.

Hume explored it like this: Say we observe A causing B. It happens repeatedly, even when we kick off A ourselves. Is this enough to say A is always followed by B? We might say: yes, because past evidence has pointed at A->B. But why do we think past evidence means the trend will continue? We'd have to say: because past evidence has pointed at continuing trends in the past. But this argument is circular, so it can't work.

A sillier version of this argument: Descartes' evil demon. Let's say an Evil Demon has just been deceiving us with evidence at every turn, and in actuality they can stop at any time and reveal our generalizations to be poor matches for a non-Demon world. We can't be sure theories are true always (we can't do induction based on empirical fact)—we can only stick with a theory until it's falsified.

I disagree entirely about the base premise here. Science is all about discovering what is actually there, by eliminating the flaws and biases inherent with our position as conscious observers. The entire premise assume that something IS there that awaits discovery. Newton didn't invent gravity, he just discovered an equation that governed the way it works, and created the name.

You can disagree with the premise, but this is the philosophy that underlies most of scientific method today.

Science is a series of propositions that happen to be useful. Gravity is a name: we can model in different ways. In one case it's an ever-present force emanating from a mass, in other cases it's a geodesic in spacetime. These are models to put our observations into simple elegant pictures.

Reality is composed only of instances of observations: not theories (and so, not forces, laws, particles, etc.). Theories are just a net we throw over observations to give them a gestalt overall picture: but it's not real, the same way constellations aren't real. It's a picture connecting dots.

Yeah, and what you’re saying makes me think of the phrase “all models are wrong, but some are useful”. As long as you understand the limitations of your methods, it’s less about being exactly right to 100,000,000 decimal places, and more about “will this building stand up?”

>I always feel it isn't quite right to say that Newtonian physics is wrong.

I like to use Newtonian physics as an example of how new physics doesn't mean the previous theory was "wrong". In the low speed limit the Einstein equations for special relativity just become the Newtonian equations.

So in the low speed limit in which Newtonian equations of motion were tested, they are "right".

>But given two competing unfalsified theories, what we call "true" is given by simplicity considerations.

Sounds like some weird philosophical definition of "true" rather than anything anyone in science would understand.

It seems you are drawing a great connection that's not there. Occam's Razor is only a guide. You almost make it sound like the heliocentric model is just one equally valid viewpoint as the Ptolemaic model but that people just liked it more because it was simpler. I think this fails to see the point entirely. We choose it not because it's simpler, but because it's correct. The relative simplicity is emergent.

The Ptolemaic model could also be made to be correct, given more complexity.

Kuhn:

"Given a particular discrepancy, astronomers were invariably able to eliminate it by making some particular adjustment in Ptolemy’s system of compounded circles."

It's just that the juice isn't worth the squeeze as models grow more complex, so we switched

I think these arguments apply just as well for falsification. You can't be sure that a theory that has been falsified will stay falsified in the future and won't be re-validated.

Thankfully just being falsified once at any point in space and time is enough to say a theory isn't generally correct for all space and time, so you can throw it out.

This asymmetry in how easy it is to prove a counterexample vs how easy it is to universally verify is why we stick with falsification as the main avenue for scientific progress.

No, because you don't know if there was some mistake or something which means that the finding you got at that point in space and time will never be repeated or something like that. Just like how you occasionally get these big physics experiments which get some statistically significant result that for some reason dsiappears and what they thought they found didn't really turn out to be anything. This applies just as well to falsifying as verifying.

Ah yeah, in which case you recant that falsification. But as soon as you get one you're confident in, it's kinda falsified for good.

Whereas if you try verifying — you'll never know, since you can't test every instance in space in time.

>But as soon as you get one you're confident in, it's kinda falsified for good.

But then how do you know you can be confident. This brings in the same circular issues you criticised induction as having... because it is induction.

Not quite, since it doesn't need to generalize, one counter example is enough. You need to be confident in just one counterexample.

In the verification scheme, you can't ever be confident because you could never test all examples ever.

In one case (falsification) confidence is at least possible, and in the other, it isn't—which makes one of them strictly better

It does need to generalize because if this single counter example was flawed then it completely invalidates the whole thing. You need to be sure that this single counter example is actually valid and that if you repeated it ad infinitum you would get the same result again and again and again which you can't be sure of. There maybe an irrelevant reason why thos counter example occurred. I think there is a very well known example that I can't remember specifically which is how the orbit of some planet in the solar system actually "falsified" Newtonian mechanics, however what was not taken into account was another body affecting the orbit of that planet which skewed the result, so it appeared to falsify it when it didn't. Now surely for every event of falsification, to be one hundred percent sure you are falsifying what you think you are, you need to rule out every single one of these alternative explanations.

i think ultimately, you have to verify that your falsification is valid.

Falsification is just when some other statement incompatible with a theory is "accepted". If you choose not to accept it again then the falsification doesn't occur. A falsification is also a single instance you are confident in. One experiment! If you do another experiment it's not a re-litigation of the previous falsification at time 1, it's actually just another falsification at time 2. You might choose not to accept Experiment 1s results for some reason, but Experiment 2 could still stand. You just need one instance you accept to falsify a theory.

To verify a theory you need to prove infinite cases

>If you choose not to accept it again then the falsification doesn't occur.

Yes, which is the same problem that induction and verification has. You can infer and verify something then later find out that you can no longer accept it. It applies just as much to falsification as verification.

>One experiment! If you do another experiment it's not a re-litigation of the previous falsification at time 1, it's actually just another falsification at time 2

Well if you are talking about the same type of phenomenon explored several times, I don't see how it is different from the classic example in induction about the sun not rising the next day. In the induction example, sun rises on day 1 but not day 2, in the falsification example instance 1 might be the orbit of some planet and instance 2 might be the discovery that the orbit is affected by some other body. in neither example do verification or falsification are capable of permanently cementing the status of the theories. the finding of the sun not rising on day 2 might even be reversed if it rises on all the days after that and you find some good explanation of why it did not rise on that particular day. my example with the planet orbits depicts a single incidence of newtownan mechanics being falsified which can conceivably be reversed, or was actually reversed depending on how correct my example was.

I think the point you make here is fine, and it's strange that you're being downvoted. r/philosophy is not a very philosophically sophisticated audience.