Hanlon's razor
I was reading a blog article and found the proper name of a common expression that you hear. I want to read more about it.
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References
Related
- 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.
- Examples:
- 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.
- Einstein's Razor:
The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
It is often paraphrased as:Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.
- 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.
- Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
- 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.
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.
- Occam's Razor: Explanations which require fewer unjustified assumptions are more likely to be correct; avoid unnecessary or improbable assumptions.
- Popper's Falsifiability Criterion: For a theory to be considered scientific, it must be falsifiable.
- Sagan Standard: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
- Implicature
- In pragmatics, a subdiscipline of linguistics, an implicature is something the speaker suggests or implies with an utterance, even though it is not literally expressed. Implicatures can aid in communicating more efficiently than by explicitly saying everything we want to communicate. The philosopher H.P. Grice coined the term in 1975. Grice distinguished conversational implicatures, which arise because speakers are expected to respect general rules of conversion, and conventional ones, which are tied to certain words such as "but" or "therefore". In the following exchange:
- (to passerby): I am out of gas.
- There is a gas station 'round the corner.
- b does not say, but conversationally implicates, that the gas station is open, because otherwise his utterance would not be relevant in the context.
- Linguistics
- Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (riles governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds and equivalent gestures in sign languages), phonology (the abstract sound system of a particular language), and pragmatics (how the context of use contributes to meaning).
Notes
Hanlon's razor is an adage or rule of thumb that states:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
It is a philosophical razor that suggests a way of eliminating unlikely explanations for human behavior. It is probably named after Robert J. Hanlon, who submitted the statement to Murphy's Law Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong! (1980). Similar statements have been recorded since the 18th century.
Hanlon's razor became well known after its inclusion in the Jargon File, a glossary of computer programmer slang, in 1990. The name was inspired by Occam's razor.
A variation of the idea appears in The Wheels of Chance (1896) by HG Wells:
There is very little deliberate wickedness in the world. The stupidity of our selfishness gives much the same results indeed, but in the ethical laboratory it shows a different nature.