On 20.03.2013 20:18 meekerdb said the following:
On 3/20/2013 2:22 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
On 19.03.2013 22:25 Alberto G. Corona said the following:
...
I see a bit of irony in the fact that people who believe in
physical reality often call to a principle developed by Occam.
What's the irony? Occam is about our theories and models. One
generally believes in some reality; that why you develop theories
about it and try to model it. I'm not sure what 'physical' adds to
'reality'?
Let us take an atom as an example (you may replace it by an elementary
particle or a superstring, your choice). Physicists using such a concept
usually believe that the atom does exist, aren't they? In this sense,
physicists are realists.
At the Occam's time, realists were people who have believed that
universals exist. Occam has employed his razor to strip universals from
the reality and his position has led to nominalism. That is, universals
are just creation of the mind and it does not make sense to search for
them in the real world.
Presumably his positions about atoms were the same, an atom is just a
concept created by the mind - hence it does not make sense to search for
it in reality. Here is the irony.
Evgenii
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