Justifying Ockham's razor (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, May 05, 2016, 12:25 (3123 days ago) @ George Jelliss

George: Their argument ends: "there is in the end no unconditional and presuppositionless justification for Ockham's Razor".
Surely there is in the end no unconditional and presuppositionless justification for Anything! 
Even Euclid had to base his geometry on presuppositions. 
Definitions, Axioms, Postulates.
Likewise it is impossible to communicate without language.
That is the whole problem with philosophy.
Particularly of the post-modern variety.-Agreed. And this takes us back to our epistemological thread. In the end, the nearest we can get to objective knowledge is a general consensus on what is and is not true.-
George (under “Different in degree or kind”): Thought this might interest you, but I see you got there already!-http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/humans-are-highest-energy-apes-making-us-smarter...-I haven't been looking in Agnostic Web for a long while, 
but I see you are still nattering on about the same old things.-I'm afraid it's inevitable that a website devoted to discussing the existence or non-existence of God will go on nattering about the same old religions, philosophies, evolution, abiogenesis, endosymbiosis, consciousness, complexity, order, disorder, free will, morality, aesthetics, teleology, natural wonders, biology, physics, chemistry, cosmology, quantum theory, psychic experiences, epistemology, new discoveries, new theories etc…After all, it's such a limited subject.-In all seriousness, though, George, as one of our earliest contributors, you were an enormous help in launching these discussions, and I must confess I would very much have liked to hear your atheistic approach to many of the questions we have discussed in your absence. But I fully understand why you and so many others have come and gone, because - and this lies at the heart of my own agnosticism - ultimately all the discussions end up at a philosophical brick wall. If we want an answer to the unsolved mysteries of our existence, as you so rightly say above, we can only rely on our own subjective presuppositions, and there is no objective justification for ANY conclusion (including my own).-Thank you for looking in on us again, which is a genuine source of pleasure. I hope you will continue to do so, if only to shake your head and roll your eyes at the “same old”! 
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