From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org]
Sent: Thursday, March 21, 2002 1:17 PM
To: alt.atheism.moderated
Subject: Re: The psychology of Atheism

I wrote:

> > > Because without this principle, we have no way to choose
> > > between the usually-accepted (i.e. simplest) explanation
> > > and any of the infinitely many arbitrarily-convoluted
> > > conspiracy theories that can be tailored to fit the evidence
> > > just as well.
> > >
> > If I apply a notion of
> > simplicity to eliminate wildly complex explanations, it does
> > not follow that I must hold that the simpler of
> > two explanations must be true.
> 
> I said: (not P) -> (not C). It's fallacious to assert that I am
> thus claiming C -> P. At any rate, I don't claim precisely that
> "the simpler of two explanations must be true"; I claim it
> ceteris paribus.

My latter two sentences here are both wrong. Due to repeated
editing, the former of these two incorrectly states a point of
logic that I now see turns out to be superfluous here. The
reason it is superfluous is that Jim mis-stated my position
(and in my haste I echoed Jim's mis-statement in the
latter sentence without fully correcting that mis-statement).
I obviously do not claim that the "simpler of two explanations
must be true" even ceteris paribus, because a third explanation 
could be even simpler and yet contradict the one of middling 
simplicity.

The correct statement of my claim remains:

> Specifically:
> 
> I claim that it is never the case that of explanations
> with equal explanatory power, equal logical consistency, and
> equal consistency with other truths, the most parsimonious is
> NOT the one considered correct or true.

And so it remains the case that without this principle, we cannot
choose correctly among all the infinitely many possible
explanations that have varying complexity but equal explanatory 
power, equal logical consistency, and equal consistency with 
other truths.

--
brian@holtz.org
http://humanknowledge.net