philosophical razor

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.

Razors include:
* Occam's razor: Simpler explanations are more likely to be correct; avoid unnecessary or improbable assumptions.
* Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
* Hitchens's razor: That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
* Hume's guillotine: What ought to be cannot be deduced from what is. "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."
* 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.
: Also available as
*Sagan standard: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
* Popper's falsifiability principle: For a theory to be considered scientific, it must be falsifiable.
* Grice's razor (also known as Giume's razor): As a principle of parsimony, conversational implications are to be preferred over semantic context for linguistic explanations.

See also

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References

Razors
Arguments
Philosophical analogies
Rhetorical techniques

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