While Occam’s Razor is quite famous, I discovered in this post ‘A Look At Razors (No, Not That Kind)‘ that there are a quite a few other well known such logical razors. This Wikipedia entry on philosophical razors also covers the topic. Logical razors serve to act as a heuristic guidance to decide on what is the best explanation for an event.
Occam’s razor is based on simplicity. There are several formulations, I like the one given in the post: “When presented with competing hypothetical answers to a problem, one should select the answer that makes the fewest assumptions.”
Among the other razors, I like Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity“
Popper’s falsifiability principle is also quite interesting: “For a theory to be considered scientific, it must be falsifiable“.
Or, Hitchens’ razor: “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”
In fact we should use those razors more often than we do. These are quite interesting heuristics worth pondering when faced with some unexpected evidence, theory or observation!
