Ockham and the Spaceman

Considering the ubiquity of the term ‘Ockham’s Razor’ it’s surprising to learn that Ockham didn’t coin it.

Nor did he particularly popularise the concept. 

He wasn’t even called Ockham. 

 Ockham is a village in Surrey and it was the birthplace of a 14th century Franciscan friar called William who studied theology at the University of Oxford. However, he also spent a lot of his time criticising the Catholic Church and, after being accused of heresy in 1323, he was summoned to a papal court in Avignon and kept under house arrest for four years while his crimes were investigated. As the hearing date approached, William and a group of fellow frightened Franciscans became convinced that a fair trial was unlikely. They therefore staged an escape and rode on stolen horses to the court of King Louis of Bavaria to ask for sanctuary. William eventually settled in Munich and spent the rest of his life writing critiques against Rome. He is believed to have died in 1347. 

But the one thing that William of Ockham didn’t do was invent ‘Ockham’s Razor’. 

The phrase wasn’t coined until centuries after his death and is attributed to the Belgian theologian Libert Froidmont (1587-1653). Quite why he chose to immortalise William in this way is a bit of a mystery as the ‘law of parsimony’ ie: ‘All things considered, the simplest answer is usually the best’ is much older than William and can be found in the writings of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Ptolemy and many other philosophers that he would have been familiar with. Even more surprisingly, there are times when William seems to argue against the concept, such as when he wrote: ‘Nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture.’ This suggests that, if William were presented with two competing ideas – such as the planets revolving around the Sun due to the force of gravity, versus the planets moving by way of God’s will and the actions of angels – he’d have chosen the latter because, while it may or may not be the simplest explanation, it carried the authority of his religious convictions. 

It’s ironic that the reasons why Ockham’s Razor is so named are neither simple nor obvious.

I mention this because I've always had an issue with the concept. Working, as I did, for several decades in the realms of problem solving, crime prevention and behavioural science, I quickly came to realise that Ockham's Razor only works in purely logical situations. However, almost any situation involving human beings is not purely logical. It's emotional and complex. There's often some baggage or backstory that affects the way that people react. There are all kinds of -isms to consider as well: sexism, racism, classism, genderism, leftism, rightism, even speciesism. Oh yes, there is speciesism. Consider your can of dolphin-friendly tuna ... it's hardly tuna-friendly is it?

I was discussing Ockham today in the context of a famous mystery - the Solway Firth Spaceman photograph.

The photograph above was taken on the23rd May 1964 by a fireman called Jim Templeton. In a letter to the Daily Mail in 2002, Templeton stated, 'I took three pictures of my daughter Elizabeth in a similar pose – and was shocked when the middle picture came back from Kodak displaying what looks like a spaceman in the background.'Templeton insists that he did not see the figure until after his photographs were developed, and analysts at Kodak confirmed that the photograph was genuine. So what did he photograph? Journalist David Clarke posited an explanation for the anomaly in the photograph in a 2014 BBC interview, concluding that the figure was the photographer's wife, standing with her back towards the camera, her blue dress appearing white due to overexposure. Templeton's wife, Annie, was present at the time and was seen on another photograph taken that day. 'I think for some reason his wife walked into the shot and he didn't see her because with that particular make of camera you could only see 70% of what was in the shot through the viewfinder', said Clarke. Annie Templeton was wearing a pale blue dress on the day in question, which was partially overexposed as white in another photo; she also had dark bobbed hair. It has been argued that the figure is actually Annie viewed from behind. But what about the space helmet? The Very Nearly Interesting Youtube channel has done some digging and has found compelling evidence that, by a thousand to one chance, Annie's head was silhouetted against the Moon.

   

Of course, Ockham's Razor - if we were to use it - would say 'It's a spaceman'.