If you cant say it in one sentence...

Which brings up another clever philosophical statement/question. Is one lying if what they’re writing is true during the actual time the writing takes place, but loses it’s correctness upon being made public, even if the writer had the chance to correct the misstatement before making it public?

Flannel, I’ve been running across debates on Occam’s Razor, and yet don’t know what it’s about; I realize here and now is a very ideal time to ask for a short explanation of the term.

Yes and no.

The simpler the better.

So if one is incapable of understanding the concept, they would be among the best?

The simpler the better is what Occam’s Razor is, it’s not a call for a simple explanation of it.

Maybe not, but Stuart’s Dull Hacksaw is exactly that.

It’s where the very concept of the Dull Hacksaw itself is negated as simply as possibly. Of course that explanation is not Stuart’s Dull Hacksaw, neither was that, this is:

Stuart’s Dull Hacksaw.

Occam’s Razor is merely a method for choosing between two equally true ontologies (or statements). It is not a denial of one, but rather a preference of the other.

Ok, firstly my apologies for using ‘occam’s razor’ in that way, my thinking stems from Buddhist thinking which is similar in a way;

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length
from the wiki link:
The minimum description length (MDL) principle is a formalization of Occam’s Razor in which the best hypothesis for a given set of data is the one that leads to the best compression of the data.


In Buddhist thinking we always attempt to reduce things down to their naked elements, and remove all the clutter – so to speak.

maxwell’s equations are saying it in the shortest way imho, but thunder is a complex thing involving many factors, so naturally the description of that will be complex and long. The descriptions for each aspect of thunder could be shorter, and if we keep reducing we eventually end up with the smallest set of meanings. Keep going and we get down to forces of nature, and then to the fundamental nature of reality, ergo ‘the process’ of finding the ‘simplest thing’ ends up with the simplest explanation of what everything >is<!

Perhaps ‘witch’ and ‘thunder’ are abstractions? whereas the full description is the real reduction. …and probably composed of many meanings.

Curiosity expands statements.
John shot a bear.
Who’s John?
Did he kill the bear?
What kind of bear was it?
Why did John shoot the bear?
Did John use a bow & arrow? A shotgun? A rifle?

Human thought has physical underpinnings.
Say what?

This:

That’s one way of saying it.

Are there other ways of saying it?

Yes, and many you may have heard of such as… not. But, I wouldn’t got hat far, I only found your statement to be someone inaccurate, being the Sartrean existentialist that I am, but couldn’t quite say why. Now I know, the ‘underpinnings’ need not be pluralized, physical is the underpinning of thought, thought creates the divergence into plurality.

That’s not the OR, though it is a pretty common misinterpretation of it.
If you have a choice between two explanations and Z needs only three entities in its explanation while Y has 4, as long as Z adequately explains phenomenon B, then it is better to work with and test Z until further notice. It is a metholodological suggestion. Neuroscientists and particle physicists would have a problem if simple explanations were better than more complicated ones.

[size=85]Metholodological = methodological[/size] ^^

That is asking questions endlessly, not answering them in the shortest way possible. It is true though that you can do that. So are both statements true even if conflicting? What if the world has two or more truths about a thing? That perhaps just gives us categories of truth rather than absolutes ~ I quite like that philosophy.

Eureka!
Ah!
Holy Cow!
Mira!

and one that I absolutely hate…
Whatever!

Sometimes one word carries with it more meaning than a whole phrase, sentence, paragraph ad continuum.

To be or not to be - a Kurt Vonnegut or a Charles Dickens and William Faulkner.

Totally agree that there are categories of truth.

Don’t get clever, girl.

Vonnegut’s Style

Kurt Vonnegut’s own style of writing tends to be minimalist and dry, utilizing short sentences and avoiding wordy run-ons. His lessons on writing reflect his own style of crafting stories.

Simplicity in language is something highly regarded by Vonnegut. He believed that simplicity is a lost art, one that when utilized correctly could convey every emotion in human language in only a few words.

He likened this skill to William Shakespeare and James Joyce, who with only simple words and phrases, could break the hearts of their readers or send them into a metaphysical rabbit hole. When Shakespeare’s Hamlet famously utters, ‘‘To be or not to be’’, his use of words no longer than three letters still resounds with readers today as one of the most meaningful and powerful questions.

Shakespeare and Joyce, to continue with Vonnegut’s own examples, mastered their own voice. They wrote in a voice they were familiar with as children to best get their message across.

Vonnegut describes himself in contrast to the musical beauty of some other more geographically blessed authors. He stated: ‘‘I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.’’

study.com/academy/lesson/kurt-vo … hemes.html

Of course, this is only one perspective.
At times, we need to fill that canvas with many different brush strokes of many different hues and colors.