文章基本信息

标题："Ockham's Razor and Chemistry"
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作者：Roald Hoffmann ; Barry K. Carpenter ; Vladimir I. Minkin 等
期刊名称：Hyle : International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry
印刷版ISSN：1433-5158
出版年度：1997
卷号：3
页码：3-28
出版社：HYLE Publications, Karlsruhe and University of Karlsruhe
摘要：We begin by presenting William of Ockham's various formulations of his principle of parsimony, Ockham's Razor. We then define a reaction mechanism and tell a personal story of how Ockham's Razor entered the study of one such mechanism. A small history of methodologies related to Ock-ham's Razor, least action and least motion, follows. This is all done in the context of the chemical (and scientific) community's almost unthinking accep-tance of the principle as heuristically valuable. Which is not matched, to put it mildly, by current philosophical attitudes toward Ockham's Razor. What ensues is a dialogue, pro and con. We first present a context for questioning, within chemistry, the fundamental assumption that underlies Ockham's Ra-zor, namely that the world is simple. Then we argue that in more than one pragmatic way the Razor proves useful, without at all assuming a simple world. Ockham's Razor is an instruction in an operating manual, not a world view. Continuing the argument, we look at the multiplicity and continuity of con-certed reaction mechanisms, and at principal component and Bayesian analysis (two ways in which Ockham's Razor is embedded into modern statistics). The dangers to the chemical imagination from a rigid adherence to an Ockham's Razor perspective, and the benefits of the use of this venerable and practical principle are given, we hope, their due.
关键词：Ockham's Razor; reaction mechanism; principle of least action; prin-;cip le of least motion; principal component analysis; Bayesian analysis