Editing Occam's razor (section)

==== Elliott Sober ====
The philosopher of science [[Elliott Sober]] once argued along the same lines as Popper, tying simplicity with "informativeness": The simplest theory is the more informative, in the sense that it requires less information to a question.<ref name="Sober975">{{Cite book |url=https://archive.org/details/simplicity0000sobe |title=Simplicity |last=Sober |first=Elliott |publisher=[[Clarendon Press]] |year=1975 |isbn=978-0-19-824407-3 |location=Oxford |author-link=Elliott Sober |url-access=registration}}</ref> He has since rejected this account of simplicity, purportedly because it fails to provide an [[epistemology|epistemic]] justification for simplicity. 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 embedded in a specific context (Sober 1992). If we fail to justify simplicity considerations on the basis of the context in which we use them, we may have no non-circular justification: "Just as the question 'why be rational?' may have no non-circular answer, the same may be true of the question 'why should simplicity be considered in evaluating the plausibility of hypotheses?{{'"}}<ref name="Sober2002">{{Cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-YdbBN-O-JAC&q=zellner+simplicity |title=Simplicity, Inference and Modeling: Keeping it Sophisticatedly Simple |last=Sober |first=Elliott |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2004 |isbn=978-0-521-80361-8 |editor-last=Zellner |editor-first=Arnold |location=Cambridge, U.K. |pages=13–31 |chapter=What is the Problem of Simplicity? |access-date=4 August 2012 |editor-last2=Keuzenkamp |editor-first2=Hugo A. |editor-link2=Hugo A. Keuzenkamp |editor-last3=McAleer |editor-first3=Michael |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=J_CDXu24qZUC&q=sober+rival+hypotheses&pg=RA1-PA13 |archive-date=28 October 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231028141247/https://books.google.com/books?id=-YdbBN-O-JAC&q=zellner+simplicity#v=snippet&q=zellner%20simplicity&f=false |url-status=live }} [https://web.archive.org/web/20060901082031/http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/TILBURG.pdf Paper as PDF.]</ref>