Philosophical razors:
In philosophy, a razor is a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to eliminate ("shave off") unlikely explanations for a phenomenon.[1]
Razors include:
- Occam's razor: When faced with competing hypotheses, select the one that makes the fewest assumptions and is thus most open to being tested. Do not multiply entities without necessity.
- Grice's razor: As a principle of parsimony, conversational implications are to be preferred over semantic context for linguistic explanations.[2][3]
- Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.[4]
- Hume's razor: "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."[5][6]
- Hitchens' razor: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
- Alder's razor: Also known as "Newton's flaming laser sword", it states that if something cannot be settled by experiment or observation then it is not worthy of debate.
- Popper's falsifiability principle: For a theory to be considered scientific, it must be falsifiable.
- Rand's razor: concepts are not to be multiplied beyond necessity—the corollary of which is: nor are they to be integrated in disregard of necessity.[7]
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_(philosophy)