Bayesian Occam's Razor is a Razor of the People

Jan 1, 2018·
Thomas Blanchard
Thomas Blanchard
,
Tania Lombrozo
,
Shaun Nichols
· 0 min read
Abstract
Occam’s razor plays a prominent role in ordinary and scientific inference. One attractive hypothesis known as Bayesian Occam’s razor (BOR) is that more complex hypotheses tend to be more flexible and that flexibility is automatically penalized by Bayesian inference. In two experiments, we provide evidence that people’s intuitive probabilistic and explanatory judgments follow the prescriptions of BOR.
Type
Publication
Cognitive Science, 42(4), 1345-59
publication
Thomas Blanchard
Authors
Thomas Blanchard
Maître de Conférences en Philosophie

I am Associate Professor in the philosophy department at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne. Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy and psychology in the Concepts and Cognition Lab at UC-Berkeley for the Varieties of Understanding Project, an Assistant Professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, and an Akademischer Rat (roughly equivalent to assistant professor) at the University of Cologne. I received my Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 2014.

My research is in the philosophy of science, and focuses mainly on causation, causal modeling and causal explanation. I am interested in a wide variety of issues concerning causation including causal asymmetries, levels of causal explanation, the causal exclusion problem, the epistemology of causal inference, causal cognition, and causal decision theory. My work also investigates the use of certain causal concepts and assumptions in particular sciences such as biology, epidemiology and medicine.