Philosophical razor
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In philosophy, a razor is a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to eliminate (shave off) unlikely explanations for a phenomenon, or avoid unnecessary actions.[1] Common examples include:
- Alder's razor (also known as Newton's flaming laser sword): If something cannot be settled by experiment or observation, then it is not worthy of debate.[2]
- Grice's razor (also known as Guillaume's razor): As a principle of parsimony, conversational implicatures are to be preferred over semantic context for linguistic explanations.[3]
- Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.[4]
- Hitchens' razor: That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.[5]
- Hume's guillotine: What ought to be cannot be deduced from what is; prescriptive claims cannot be derived solely from descriptive claims, and must depend on other prescriptions.
- Hume's Proportionality of Cause: "If the cause, assigned for any effect, be not sufficient to produce it, we must either reject that cause, or add to it such qualities as will give it a just proportion to the effect."[6]
- Occam's razor: Explanations that require fewer assumptions are more likely to be correct; avoid unnecessary assumptions.
- Popper's falsification criterion of demarcation: For a theory to be considered scientific, it must be falsifiable.[7]
- Sagan standard: Positive claims require positive evidence, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.[8]
See also
[edit]
- Abductive reasoning – Inference seeking the simplest and most likely explanation
- Duck test – Classification based on observable evidence
- Law of the instrument – Over-reliance on a familiar tool
- Epistemology – Philosophical study of knowledge
- Explanatory power – Ability of a theory to explain a subject
- Marcello Truzzi § "Extraordinary claims"
- Gödel's incompleteness theorems
- Morgan's Canon – Law of parsimony in comparative (animal) psychology
- Morton's fork – False dilemma in which contradictory observations lead to the same conclusion
- Russell's teapot – Analogy formulated by Bertrand Russell to illustrate that the burden of proof lies upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims
- Occam's razor § Anti-razors
- Zebra (medicine) – Exotic diagnosis in medicine which is usually unnecessary and wrong
References
[edit]
- ↑
- Garg, Anu (17 May 2010). "Occam's razor". A.Word.A.Day. Archived from the original on 9 March 2014. Retrieved 25 February 2014.
- Downie, R. S. (November 1989). "Moral Philosophy". In Eatwell, John; Milgate, Murray; Newman, Peter (eds.). The Invisible Hand. Palgrave MacMillan. pp. 213–222. ISBN 9781349203130.
- McLean, Sheila A. M., ed. (2013). First Do No Harm: Law, Ethics and Healthcare. Ashgate. ISBN 9781409496199.
- ↑ Alder, Mike (2004). "Newton's Flaming Laser Sword". Philosophy Now. 46: 29–33. Archived from the original on 4 December 2017. Retrieved 26 January 2018. Also available in PDF format: Alder, Mike (2004). "Newton's Flaming Laser Sword" (PDF). Mike Alder's Home Page. University of Western Australia. Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 November 2011.
- ↑
- Hazlett, A. (2007). "Grice's razor". Metaphilosophy. 38 (5): 669. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9973.2007.00512.x.
- "Implicature, 6: Gricean Theory". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Archived from the original on 11 December 2016. Retrieved 27 December 2016.
- ↑ "Hanlon's Razor". The Jargon File 4.4.7. Archived from the original on 30 April 2011. Retrieved 25 February 2014.
- ↑ Ratcliffe, Susan, ed. (2016). Oxford Essential Quotations: Facts (4th ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780191826719. Retrieved 4 November 2020.
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
- ↑
- Miles, M. (2003). Inroads: Paths in Ancient and Modern Western Philosophy. University of Toronto Press. p. 543. ISBN 978-0802037442 – via Internet Archive.
- Forrest, P. (2001). "Counting the cost of modal realism". In Preyer, G.; Siebelt, F. (eds.). Reality and Humean Supervenience: Essays on the Philosophy of David Lewis. Studies in Epistemology and Cognitive Theory. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 93. ISBN 978-0742512016 – via Google Books.
- ↑ Popper, Karl (1972). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Hutchinson. ISBN 9780091117207.
- ↑ Sagan, Carl (2021). Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science. New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 978-0-345-33689-7.
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