Razor-sharp logic

I recently came across a statement I found rather amusing:

“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

Apparently, this adage goes by the name “Hitchens’s Razor”, after Christopher Hitchens, a well-known atheist-author, who used this guiding principle to dismiss baseless religious claims.

It’s a pithy aphorism, and although I wouldn’t say it’s always applicable (I can think of abuse allegations, for instance, which shouldn’t be dismissed right away without evidence), I find it a good rule-of-thumb to go by. It seems especially relevant now, in a world where people can make random claims without any evidence and make us rational folk feel like we’re obligated to try and disprove them every step of the way.

But seeing this made me think – it’s clever and all, but why is it called a “razor”?

The only other “razor” I could think of was “Occam’s Razor”, which states that “when presented with several alternative possible explanations for something, you should pick the one with fewest assumptions”. I first learned about it when watching “House, MD”¹, although Dr. House phrases it a bit differently – “Occam’s Razor–the simplest explanation is almost always that somebody screwed up.” It still didn’t explain why it’s called a razor, though. I mean, “Schrodinger’s cat” involves a cat; and “Pandora’s box” a box. But “Occam’s razor” and “Hitchens’s razor” have nothing to do with blades.

So I looked it up, and Wiktionary’s formal definition of razor is

“a conceptual device that allows one to shave away unlikely explanations for a phenomenon.”

This “shaving away” is why the term razor is apt, it seems.

I wasn’t fully convinced, though. The definition seemed alright for Occam’s razor, but I didn’t quite understand why Hitchens’s razor warranted that name. So, having found two razors, I wondered if there were examples of others. Perhaps looking at all those examples put together might help?

It turns out that there are, and they are all named after – you guessed it! – white men: there’s “Hanlon’s razor”, “Feynman’s razor” (because of course he would have some clever-sounding statement named after him), and the ridiculous-sounding “Newton’s flaming laser sword” which also goes by “Alder’s razor”.

“Never attribute to malice what can reasonably be explained by stupidity.” – Hanlon’s razor

“If you cannot explain a concept simply, you don’t truly understand it.” – Feynman’s razor

“A claim that cannot be verified by either experiment or observation is not worth debating.” – Alder’s razor (a.k.a. Newton’s flaming laser sword²)

Hmmm. I’d say that, having looked at both definition and examples, I’m still not sure what determines whether a statement is a razor or not. So I turned to my philosopher friend – a real doctor of philosophy – for advice. He explained that a razor is just a heuristic (i.e., a rule-of-thumb) that serves as a guide for reasoning. It usually helps make a decision (e.g., you dismiss something or not), but it may not always be correct. For instance, it might be useful to apply Occam’s razor (which he spelt Ockham’s razor) and reject a complicated explanation in favour of a simpler one, but that doesn’t guarantee that the simpler explanation is necessarily correct. So it’s a useful rule-of-thumb, but not one with rigorous, airtight reasoning by itself.

Alright. That does help clarify the rationale for a special name a bit, but I still find the definition of a razor rather subjective, and the term itself unnecessarily fancy, especially since it’s not all that sharp to begin with. It could be called a “rule”, or a “guideline” without losing any of its depth of significance. Moreover, from my discussion with my friend, it seems to me that philosophers don’t really label statements as razors all that often, in any case.

So, to add to the list of razors, here’s my own. You can call it “Aalok’s razor” or “Varma’s razor” – either option is fine by me:

“Any heuristic that is called a razor can just as easily not be called a razor, especially if it is named for a famous [white] person.”

This may arguably be the most useful razor of them all.