Is failure to elucidate the opposite of occam's razor?

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	Is failure to elucidate the opposite of occam's razor?
	asked on Sunday, Aug 31, 2014 07:36:15 AM by
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Eat Meat... Or Don't.

Roughly 95% of Americans don’t appear to have an ethical problem with animals being killed for food, yet all of us would have a serious problem with humans being killed for food. What does an animal lack that a human has that justifies killing the animal for food but not the human?

As you start to list properties that the animal lacks to justify eating them, you begin to realize that some humans also lack those properties, yet we don’t eat those humans. Is this logical proof that killing and eating animals for food is immoral? Don’t put away your steak knife just yet.

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Bo Bennett, PhD 0	Occam's razor is a statistical rule that suggests given all other things equal, the simplest explanation is likely to be the correct one. Failure to elucidate is not a rule, but more an observation that one has taken a confusing concept and make it worse or simply failed to make it any more clear, while giving the impression that they did. It does not make any claims about the truth of the claim or argument whereas Occam's razor does. Update: In science, Occam's razor is a heuristic (a rule of thumb) and not a guiding principle nor an important part of the methodology. The reason the explanation with the least number of assumptions is generally more likely to be to be correct, it because of the infinite number of assumptions that can be added to any explanation, making the explanation less probable. For example, Explanation #1: The dog barked sitting by the door because he wanted to come inside the house. Explanation #2: The dog barked sitting by the door because he was cold, bored, lonely, and wanted to come inside the house and be with other people. Besides being much more complex, explanation #2 is unfalsifiable (how can we tell if a dog is bored?). Explanation #1 is favored because of its simplicity, although explanation #2 can be correct.
	answered on Saturday, Feb 14, 2015 05:01:23 AM by Bo Bennett, PhD
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