I am sick of hearing about Ockham’s Razor. Not because I think it’s an unimportant thing to understand, mind you, but rather because it has been almost universally misunderstood and so is almost always misapplied. One example is the contemporary trend of reducing moral values to the inclinations present in individual experience—a modern lex parsimoniae with severe, rationalistic consequences.
First, a short word on what Ockham’s Razor is not. It is not, as most tend to think, the mere axiomatic belief that “the simplest explanation is usually the right one.” Anyone who’s read Ockham—any portion of the thousands and thousands of pages he wrote—knows that as one of the most prolific authors of the Late Middle Ages, simple explanations weren’t his game. On the other hand, defending a simple world—i.e., a world with very few real objects—was precisely his goal. But getting there wasn’t easy; it meant systematically denying about ninety-percent of what came before him, stacking up reality upon reality inside the mind, and making a regular practice of biting philosophical bullets the size of cannonballs.
In a word, Ockham’s Razor is the idea that the world is eminently simple, but that our experience of it is not.
Fast-forward seven-hundred years. Quarks, leptons, and bosons (and maybe their interactions) are the totality of “what’s out there.” According to science, we live in a pretty parsimonious world. But anyone who knows particle physics also realizes that accounting for these basic realities is no cakewalk. Pitch the “simplest explanation” theory to the guys at Gran Sasso lab working to figure out if neutrinos travel faster than light and see how it goes over.
As one might expect, the same attitudes that ground modern physics also ground our approach to other sciences—most notably, the science of conscious human action, or ethics. By a worst-case scenario, all action is reducible to the interaction of atomic parts, rendering any discussion of real ethical values fruitless. More common, though, is the view that “what’s out there” has little if any real value in itself; instead, it’s how we interact with and treat things in the world that determines their value. In short, good and bad actions are reduced to intentional qualities of the mind. Thinking of certain things together—i.e., intending that they go together in some such way—ends up justifying a huge portion of what we do.
As with Ockham, contemporary secular ethics realizes that some of what came before it is indeed worth keeping. The basic grammar of rights, justice, and law remain intact. However, their usage is wholly transposed, and the ideas that underlie such terms have been shifted dramatically away from having a basis in the outside world, and totally into the realm of the conceptual (cf. Ockham’s assessment of universals, categories of being, and natures).
To accomplish his grand reduction, Ockham employed an arsenal of semantic machinery, designed to eliminate historical problems at their very root. For example, by following Scotus in advocating a univocally predicable concept of “being,” and by reworking the types of logical supposition—i.e., determining what ‘thing’ a word stands for in a sentence—Ockham was able simply to do away with four-fifths of Aristotle’s ontological schema. Indeed, those of us who spend time advocating basic human rights find ourselves facing an equally shrewd foe, namely an academic culture unafraid of mechanistically swapping out one meaning of a term for another. (Take, for example, the notoriously hijacked word “pregnancy,” which many use in order to utterly exclude any notion of pre-implanted life.)
At bottom, Ockham’s Razor—in its truest form—is used as more of an Axe. While it’s not right, in my accounting, to place the “blame” of the modern turn squarely on his shoulders, there’s no doubting that Ockham’s voice was a distinctive undertone in the chorus (or cacophony, depending on how you look at it) of early modern attacks on the basic intelligibility of the outside world.
Psychologizing away the bases of ethical normativity has rendered objective ethical language incomprehensible. We are left with far less complicated ethical questions (like deciding if we can afford to feed a parking meter). The counterpart, though, is an utterly impoverished sense of happiness, fulfillment, and value.
If Ockham’s Razor is, in fact, worth the hubbub it garners in popular culture, then it is so by virtue of the radical historical and cultural displacement it signifies. There is no doubt that the same pseudo-intelligentsia that embraces the “simplest is best” reading of Ockham is also hard at work legislating by the lex parsimoniae to reduce—if not entirely eradicate—the actual impact of natural values on moral decision making. Fortunately, by accurately understanding the methodology in question, we stand a much better chance of dulling the Razor’s blade.
Andrew Haines is president of the Center for Morality in Public Life, and a PhD student in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America.
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Comments:
Some say his inspiration for this, by the way, was Catholicism.
I suspect we'd all benefit from more philosophy in pop. culture. How can you argue (literal sense of the word not the inflammatory) about something if you don't even know the basic rules of logic? This is why we increasingly find ourselves shouting at each other.
Shouldn't you have meant, in the Razor's "most misappropriated form," for surely Ockham did not wield his rule of parsimony so bluntly. Insofar as modern culture has misappropriated and distorted the Razor for its own purposes, I think you are correct.
"there’s no doubting that Ockham’s voice was a distinctive undertone in the chorus (or cacophony, depending on how you look at it) of early modern attacks on the basic intelligibility of the outside world."
I'm not sure this is correct. I might argue that it was the Catholic critique of Ockham that trotted out Ockham's philosophy and then ascribed to it all the ills of "early modern attacks." I think Catholic authors give Ockham too much credit. Moreover, Brian Tierney has thoroughly rehabilitated Ockham vis a vis Aquinas in "The Idea of Natural Rights." If Ockham's voice was an undertone in the chorus of attacks on the basic intelligibility of the world, it was because he was misunderstood (either through ignorance or willful intent).
Ockham might have followed Aquinas to some extent. Alhough, if Aquinas addressed and even embraced "natural" rights,"Aquinas himself was already meeting science and the study of "nature" halfway. As was his wont to do in fact, with concepts like the "rational soul."
But I'm grateful to smart guys like the author and commenters here who can help us un-philosopher types understand the pernicious ideas that in effect undermine reality.
Wait. Why would the 'simplest explanation' be that Einstein was wrong? We have a *lot* of data supporting General Relativity. *One* set of data that doesn't fit doesn't automatically overthrow that.
And, indeed... today was not the day to bring this up as an example: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/02/breaking-news-error-undoes-faster.html
There's a fair amount of evidence that some things in the universe, even some stars, are travelling faster than light. And it's possible according to my own theory and examples (Woodbridgegoodman, on Natural Theology, final footnotes, somewhere?)
(This might not be so devastating to Einstein either; who merely said that his equations told him that things approaching the speed of light, acquire a mass of "infinity." He and others said more exactly, they did not know what that means; not that is was impossible.)
Indee, our more exact knowledge of "realms of infinity" today, suggests that infinity can be and is regularly traversed. Resolving Zeno's paradox: when I shoot an arrow, the space it traverses, could be infinitely subdivided. And yet? The arrow somehow traverses THAT infinity.
Fairly simple, actually.
Would you RATHER that I made all that hopelessly complex?
There's a side of religion, that worships complexity, and ignorance. We want to worship "mystery." Or here, complexity. But? To worship mystery is objectionable in two ways: first 1) you don't know what you are worshiping. It is easy to make mistakes. And 2) in effect, you are worshipping Ignorance.
The more you don't know, the more mysterious things are ... and the more holy you are, enveloped in The Mystery? So: the more ignorant you are, the more mysterious and holy things seem.
To be holy then? All you have to be holy, is to be .... Ignorant. Enveloped in and baffled by the complexity of things.
And never resolving, finding, anything that works.
Y'know, that seems wrong. He put it, "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily". Einstein expressed the same concept, too: "Everything should be kept as simple as possible, but no simpler."
Given two explanations, both of which account for the facts, Ockham and Einstein (and most people in most circumstances) go with the simpler explanation. There's a practical reason for this - there's *no upper limit* to how complicated you can make an explanation. You can spin an *endless* number of explanations to account for any given set of facts.
How to pick? By definition, they all account for all the facts. (If one didn't, it would ipso facto not *be* an explanation.) Picking the simplest is both pragmatic, *and* allows for more robust testing when new facts come in. (A simpler explanation is easier to disprove than a complex one.)
It is true that Ockham can sound like an Aristotelian and even a Thomist at times--when, for instance, he's speaking of the potentia dei ordinata--but I think there's little doubt that Ockham's rejection of universal forms or essences entails the rejection not only of the Platonic variety but also of the Aristotelian variety as well. Where Plato and Aristotle dispute the locus of universal forms, Ockham rejects their existence. Thus Ockham's famed voluntarism, which is indeed at odds with both Aristotelian and the Thomistic moral metaphysics. For when Ockham speaks in reference to the potentia dei absoluta he says that nothing is intrinsically good or evil, right or wrong. God could have made murder, theft, adultery, lying, and hatred of the deity good had he so willed. There are no absolute or intrinsic goods. Good and evil, right and wrong are simply prescriptions and proscriptions of an omnipotent will constrained only by the necessity of divine existence and the law of non-contradiction (though perhaps identity and the excluded middle as well). This all is quite evident in Ockham's writing. And the contradiction with Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas is evident as well--as is equally apparent the way in which Hobbes is, in matters metaphysical and moral, Ockham's progeny.
Forgetting historical chronology, Aquinas can sound like Ockham. For example, in I Sent., d. 19, q. 5, a.1, Aquinas states:
"Humanitas enim est aliquid in re, non tamen ibi habet rationem universalis, cum non sit extra animam aliqua humanitas multis communis; sed secundum quod accipitur in intellectu, adjungitur ei per operationem intellectus intentio secundum quam diciture species."
On this at least, Aquinas and Ockham agree: there are no universals "out there" included among the furniture of the world. I would add that Aristotle too came to the same conclusion more than a millenium earlier. If Aquinas is not to be charged with rejecting Aristotelian forms and essences, Ockham ought not either.
I find your inference "Thus Ockham's famed voluntarism" too quick. A number of additional premises are required to logically link Ockham's position on universals to his voluntarism. In any case, the former does not necessitate the later.
I myself have never been attracted to Ockham's (or anyone else's) voluntarism. However, I have occasionally run across folks within the Franciscan tradition who have managed to give it a - to me - surprisingly sympathetic presentation. Hence, I've become less dismissive than formerly.
Thanks for your response and discussion.
Enjoyed your telling of the Zeno's famous arrow paradox, sometimes called the "paradox of half distances". But I don't think you've given us any adequate suggestions as to how this paradox could possibly be resolved, thus the big question is still hanging: "Is space itself infinitely divisible, or is it not?"
Now, if one's got a wild streak, and Zeno seems a little tame, take the "Banach-Tarski " paradox for a spin.
My interpretation of Ockham is fairly standard--I follow Oakley and and Philotheus Boehner. And, of course, my comments took for granted that Aquinas is NOT a Platonist but rather an Aristotelian--though I think Eleonore Stump's judgment that Aquinas was more influenced by Plato (through Augustine, the fathers, etc.) than he was prepared to acknowledge (his having read closely only one Platonic dialogue) spot on.
By the way, Aquinas refers to the voluntaristic account of ethics that Ockham will later advance blasphemous--he says this in De veritate where he speaks of the blasphemy of reducing divine justice to will alone or to mere will.
Seems to me that Ockham's position on moral norms (that nothing is intrinsically good or evil, right or wrong) is a perfect logical fit with his position on universals. And the former does follow from the latter if Ockham is a nominalist (who denies the existence of universals, whether Platonic or Aristotelian) who also holds (as he does) a theory of obligation. Voluntartism is the only possible account of moral obligation left for a nominalist. Thus, a nominalist can either reject that we have any obligations (or that the notion of obligation is even intelligible) or the nominalist must be a voluntarist.
Such a variety of philosophers are labelled "nominalist" - and such a variety of associated definitions are advanced - that the label is more often than not unhelpful. It is, I would say, particularly unhelpful in the case of Ockham.
Although epistemological realists, Aquinas and Ockham reject the position that every general concept is founded in reality extra mentem. Some are. Some aren't. On this they agree. (E.g. Aquinas rejects the idea that every notion we have that falls under the category "relation" is so founded.) They begin to disagree not on whether we possess general concepts founded in reality but on which general concepts are so founded. As is well known, Ockham concluded that fewer of our general concepts are founded in reality extra mentem than did Aquinas.
Thus Ockham never adopted the position - which you appear to associate with him by calling him "nominalist" - that our intellects are confronted by a world of "bare particulars", affording no content to be reflected in our thought. (Those of his interpreters who have taken him this direction have, I respectfully say, subordinated Ockham's own words to their own personal agendas.)
But the point I want to emphasize is that Ockham, like Aquinas, held that some but not all of our universal concepts are founded in reality extra mentem. And further, that he, also like Aquinas, denied the existence of universals extra mentem. There is no straight path from these general propositions regarding universals to either the rejection of moral norms or, thus, to voluntarism. If there were, then Aquinas would have been logically committed to voluntarism.
You may be right regarding the path from Ockham's rejection of moral norms to voluntarism. But the path does not trace back in any more or less direct way to his rejection of universals extra mentem.
Best wishes.
I very much enjoyed your discussion and appreciated your observation that Ockham's Razor "has been almost universally misunderstood and so is almost always misapplied." Let me preface what I've next to add by saying that I am more than a decade removed from the study of Ockham particularly and medieval philosophy generally and thus trusting to increasingly fallible memory. Nonetheless ....
You state that "by following Scotus in advocating a univocally predicable concept of “being,” and by reworking the types of logical supposition—i.e., determining what ‘thing’ a word stands for in a sentence—Ockham was able simply to do away with four-fifths of Aristotle’s ontological schema." As you know, Ockham devoted considerable time and effort to explicating certain of Aristotle's works and often enough, against those with whom he differed, claimed to understand Aristotle aright. Having at one time in my life spent a fair amount of time with Aristotle's texts and subsequent commentators, Ockham's claims vis-a-vis the Philosopher are not, I found, easily dismissed in favour of others'. Hence, without a fair bit of justification, asserting that "Ockham was able simply to do away with four-fifths of Aristotle's ontological schema" is question begging. Ockham had come to the conclusion that Aristotle's categories were not a intended as a "mirror" of extra-mental reality. Whether he was right or wrong can be debated. But within his philosophical perspective, Aristotle was not, in setting forth the categories, offering an "ontological schema" to begin with. Of course, I realize a brief article isn't necessarily the appropriate place to enter into such detail.
Although you yourself avoid the not uncommon mistake of transforming Ockham into a proto-Kantian, you do open the door to your readers doing so when you write: "... the ideas that underlie such terms have been shifted dramatically away from having a basis in the outside world, and totally into the realm of the conceptual (cf. Ockham’s assessment of universals, categories of being, and natures)." Reality is, according to Ockham, populated by individual substances and qualities, of an Aristotelian variety. Our corresponding notions are not devoid of a basis in the outside world. But then neither are any of our other notions, including fictional ones. Generally speaking, for Ockham, all of our notions have a basis in reality. It is just that some more directly and some more indirectly correspond. Without loading the word "basic" to his prejudice, I fail to see how Ockham can be truly described as someone attacking "the basic intelligibility of the outside world."
Despite my quibbles, again, I wish to say I enjoyed and appreciated your article.
Thank you.