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Originally Posted by addyboy This is similar to David Hume's rejection of Ockam's Razor (which states that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one), when he disputed the Cause and Effect Hypothesis (ie, when something happened, it is caused by something else), suggesting that a ship travelling through a wake could be a cooincidence (i.e. we cannot prove that the ship itself caused the wake, something else could have caused it at exactly the same time for all we know). |
That does exist as a possibility, but surely the whole point of Ockham's Razor is that the simplest explanation is
usually the correct one? While there's no way of
proving that a mischevious imp isn't taking everyone for a ride, the notion that an army of such imps exist and have nothing better to do is fundamentally
less likely than the idea that water behaves according to set of rules A, based on list of physical properties B and external forces C, where B and C agree with everything else thus far that we at least
think we know about how stuff works. Said imp hypothesis can therefore be thrown on the 'Clearly Bollocks' pile and people can get on with their lives. If it turns out that the imp posse
does exist, then everyone can look a bit embarrassed and chalk it up to statistics.
