Occam's Razor and Central Heating Problems

[Trier]

So as I was saying in my previous post – if you have a continuing slow loss of sealed system water pressure and no evidence of leaks indoors, then the chances are that it’s going out the PRV, rather than some more exotic explanation.

This is the principle known as Occam’s Razor – BG are completely unaware of it. This principle states that when you have competing possible theories about what might be causing something, then the likelihood is that the cause is the one which least stretches your credibility.

I think it arises from an incident with this bloke Occam who got up one morning and couldn’t find his razor. So he thought to himself that either aliens had landed in the night and taken his razor away for scrutiny, or maybe his beloved missus had been very diligently cleaning and tidying and she had put it somewhere.

So he went for the most likely of these two possible explanations, and now he spends all his spare time searching for UFOs.

 

[Agile]

Wilcopedia has a slightly different explanation which does not mention UFOs:-

Occam's razor (sometimes spelled Ockham's razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham. The principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating, or "shaving off," those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory.

This is often paraphrased as "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one." In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest hypothetical entities. It is in this sense that Occam's razor is usually understood.

Originally a tenet of the reductionist philosophy of nominalism, it is more often taken today as a heuristic maxim that advises economy, parsimony, or simplicity in scientific theories.