Editing Occam's razor (section)

== Anti-razors ==
Occam's razor has met some opposition from people who consider it too extreme or rash. [[Walter Chatton]] ({{circa| 1290–1343}}) was a contemporary of William of Ockham who took exception to Occam's razor and Ockham's use of it. In response he devised his own ''anti-razor'': "If three things are not enough to verify an affirmative proposition about things, a fourth must be added and so on." Although there have been several philosophers who have formulated similar anti-razors since Chatton's time, no one anti-razor has perpetuated as notably as Chatton's anti-razor, although this could be the case of the Late Renaissance Italian motto of unknown attribution {{lang|it|Se non è vero, è ben trovato}} ("Even if it is not true, it is well conceived") when referred to a particularly artful explanation.

Anti-razors have also been created by [[Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz]] (1646–1716), [[Immanuel Kant]] (1724–1804), and [[Karl Menger]] (1902–1985). Leibniz's version took the form of a [[principle of plenitude]], as [[Arthur Lovejoy]] has called it: the idea being that God created the most varied and populous of possible worlds. Kant felt a need to moderate the effects of Occam's razor and thus created his own counter-razor: "The variety of beings should not rashly be diminished."<ref>{{Cite book |url=http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/cpr/toc.html |title=The Critique of Pure Reason |last=Immanuel Kant |publisher=Palgrave Macmillan |year=1929 |editor-last=Norman Kemp-Smith transl |page=92 |quote=Entium varietates non-temere esse minuendas |author-link=Immanuel Kant |access-date=27 October 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120516172030/http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/cpr/toc.html |archive-date=16 May 2012 |url-status=live}}</ref>

Karl Menger found mathematicians to be too parsimonious with regard to variables so he formulated his Law Against Miserliness, which took one of two forms: "Entities must not be reduced to the point of inadequacy" and "It is vain to do with fewer what requires more." A less serious but even more extremist anti-razor is [['Pataphysics]], the "science of imaginary solutions" developed by [[Alfred Jarry]] (1873–1907). Perhaps the ultimate in anti-reductionism, "'Pataphysics seeks no less than to view each event in the universe as completely unique, subject to no laws but its own." Variations on this theme were subsequently explored by the Argentine writer [[Jorge Luis Borges]] in his story/mock-essay "[[Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius]]". Physicist [[Reginald Victor Jones|R. V. Jones]] contrived Crabtree's Bludgeon, which states that "[n]o set of mutually inconsistent observations can exist for which some human intellect cannot conceive a coherent explanation, however complicated."<ref name="Woo2011">{{cite book|author=Gordon Woo|title=Calculating Catastrophe|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=hsy6CgAAQBAJ&pg=PA303|date=20 June 2011|publisher=World Scientific|isbn=978-1-84816-893-0|pages=303–|access-date=10 August 2021|archive-date=28 October 2023|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231028141247/https://books.google.com/books?id=hsy6CgAAQBAJ&pg=PA303#v=onepage&q&f=false|url-status=live}}</ref>

Recently, American physicist Igor Mazin argued that because high-profile physics journals prefer publications offering exotic and unusual interpretations, the Occam's razor principle is being replaced by an "Inverse Occam's razor", implying that the simplest possible explanation is usually rejected.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Mazin |first=Igor |date=April 2022 |title=Inverse Occam's razor |url=https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-022-01575-2 |journal=Nature Physics |language=en |volume=18 |issue=4 |pages=367–368 |doi=10.1038/s41567-022-01575-2 |arxiv=2204.08284 |bibcode=2022NatPh..18..367M |s2cid=247832936 |access-date=9 July 2023 |archive-date=9 July 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230709190723/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-022-01575-2 |url-status=live }}</ref>