Beyond Post-Empiricism Doctrine: A New Philosophy of Discovery

Abstract

Despite majority of theoretical physicists begin to accept the post-empiricism doctrine, still few physicists and mathematicians alike do not agree with such a “doctrine,” partly because it is against Popper’s criterion of falsifiability for any theory in physics and other sciences. And partly because criteria like beauty or elegance seem rather subjective for a new theory to be accepted as “physics’. Some physicists have written books on this topics [10-11]. In this article, we will not repeat those arguments; instead we only argue in favor of principle of parsimony that Nature seems to prefer least action, or least energy either in modeling complexity, assumptions and free parameters involved; thus, it is likely that minimizing computational entropy is required before getting any meaningful results. Therefore, we arrive at conclusion that one shall find a balance among some criteria, of which we may call this point “Ockham optimality point.”