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Occam's Razor is the instrumental lead-off track from The Incident by Porcupine Tree, released in 2009. The track title refers to an observation associated with the English Franciscan friar William of Ockham (c. 1287-1347) that states, "Entities should not be multiplied without necessity." This is often paraphrased into saying that the simplest or most parsimonious explanation is likeliest to be correct, but this is an oversimplification of Ockham's statement; a more correct paraphrase would be that when dealing with competing hypotheses that make the same predictions, one should choose the simplest hypothesis, but the razor is not intended to be a way of choosing between hypotheses that make different predictions.
The reason for the spelling differential is that Ockham is the Anglicised spelling of the friar's name, while Occam derives from the Latin form. Scholastic writings at the time commonly used Latin, so the spelling is now inextricably associated with the razor (in Latin, it would be named novacula Occami), even after the spelling of his name has been revised in other contexts. The razor is also sometimes referred to as the law of parsimony (lex parsimoniae in Latin).
Ockham himself is not the oldest philosopher to make the observation; similar observations can be found in the writings of John Duns Scotus (1265–1308), Robert Grosseteste (1175–1253), Maimonides (Moses ben-Maimon, 1138–1204), Ptolemy (c. 90 CE – c. 168 CE), and even Aristotle (384–322 BCE). It likely acquired its association with Ockham due to the frequency with which he employed it. The first attested usage of the phrase "Occam's razor" occurs centuries after Ockham's death, in On Christian Philosophy of the Soul (Philosophia Christiana de Anima, 1649) by Libert Froidmont (1587-1653).
The most popular phrasing of the law, "Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity" ("Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate"), is actually a formulation by the Irish Franciscan philosopher John Punch (1603-1661), from his 1639 commentary on Duns Scotus. Similar phrases, such as "Plurality must never be posited without necessity" ("Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate"), do appear in Ockham's extant writings (in this case, Sentences of Peter Lombard, or Quaestiones et decisiones in quattuor libros Sententiarum Petri Lombardi, 1495).
Occam's razor is not a rigorous arbiter between candidate laws, nor is it an irrefutable principle of logic; regardless, scientists tend to prefer simplicity upon the grounds of falsifiability (it is easier to test a simpler hypothesis than a more convoluted one, and unfalsifiable hypotheses are pseudoscientific). It is thus used as an abductive heuristic (i.e, it can help to find the simplest, likeliest cause of a phenomenon), but scientists do not consider it an infallible principle.
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