Razoring Your Thinking

Use philosophical razors to reduce the number of possible explanations which will point you toward better and more likely true explanations.

What I read: “11 Philosophical Razors to Simplify Your Life” by Chris Meyer.

Increasingly, we’re all presented with a nonstop barrage of information, claims, suppositions, theories, matters of faith, opinions, conjectures, and sometimes flat out false narratives. This happens throughout all walks of life, but social media has certainly amplified it all considerably. It can be difficult to parse out the true from the false, the likely from the unlikely.

In philosophy, razors are conceptual devices that allow us to carve away unlikely explanations for something to get at the more likely truth. Think of them as a guiding principle or rule of thumb. Razors are thinking shortcuts. Rather than have to always start from the foundation of an argument or thought process, sorting through every possible explanation, razors help the more probable falsehoods fall away so that we can more clearly see the truth, or least what’s more likely to be the truth.

Chris Meyer lists and elaborates on 11 useful razors to improve our day-to-day thinking. While Meyer chooses to focus on 11 razors, there are many. Kyle Kowalski offers 25 of them. But some of them have risen to higher prominence and are referenced often.

Perhaps the most well known of these philosophical razors is the seventh listed in Meyer’s article, Occam’s Razor.

Simpler explanations are more likely to be correct; avoid unnecessary or improbable assumptions.

I see this one brought up a lot in discussions and arguments. When presented with a bunch of possible explanations for something, the simpler ones tend to be correct much of the time.

Sadly, lots of people ignore the wisdom of Occam’s Razor and try to create complex and convoluted explanations that defy logic but appeal to some people’s desire to embrace the more complicated.

Look at all the bizarre conspiracy theories being bandied about lately, especially in political discussions. Whether it’s UFOs, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, or the current far-right QAnon nonsense that’s percolating throughout extreme right sectors of American politics, they all ignore simple explanations. Often the simple explanation doesn’t support a certain worldview. So, people simply make crap up to validate their misguided thinking.

The second razor Meyer mentions, Grice’s Razor, is often seen in online arguments when someone picks apart some specific usage of words when the intent of the words was otherwise clear to anyone paying attention.

Address what someone meant to say instead of the literal meaning of the words.

In daily usage, asking someone to repeat a question or statement to ensure that we fully understand what they’re saying is invoking Grice’s Razor by engaging in the exchange in a cooperative manner.

Look no further than American politics to see blatant violations of Grice’s Razor all the time. Political operatives pluck words out of context to imply something entirely different than the actual meaning when the words are placed within the original surrounding language. Politics is a tough game. That said, the more extreme right-wing of American politics and perhaps right-leaning politics everywhere often takes words out of context to twist their opponent’s words into something they can readily weaponize.

By now, if you don’t know already, you’ve probably figured out I’m not a right-winger or conservative. I’m a liberal. I’m even going to toss in the sometimes contentious, but I feel accurate, trope that “facts have a liberal bias.”

In contemporary American politics that’s become so starkly divided, some media outlets suffer from the unfortunate malady of bothsidism, the belief that when one side of a stance or argument is clearly the better or more decent one, it’s still incumbent upon the outlet to give equal time to the other side no matter how wacky or disregarding of the truth it might be.

Over time, facts and fairness tend to win out. Look at how long it took scientists and activists to convince a preponderance of people about climate change. Where once climate activists were considered the left fringe of social discourse now only the most entrenched of deniers continue to attempt to justify their stance.

Apologies for invoking politics again to illustrate another razor, but we are after all amid a heated election cycle. Hume’s Guillotine is used a lot in political discourse.

What ought to be cannot be deduced from what is.

A politician who stands in front of a riled-up crowd and points out a crime committed by an immigrant suddenly becomes the lie that all immigrants are criminals. It’s dangerous and hateful rhetoric, but because some people are ready to jump at that leap in thinking to validate their already existing hate or to enlist a scapegoat, it’s even more important we point out the violation of Hume’s Guillotine.

Meyer offers more razors to help us improve our thinking and discourse. I’ll let you read more about them in the article. I will however elaborate on one more because it was something my father instilled in me at a young age.

My father was an esteemed college professor considered by many to be one of the preeminent professors in his field. He was a masterful teacher as I witnessed when occasionally sitting in the back of one of his college classes watching him teach a room full of graduate students.

My father would always say that if you can’t explain something simply, then you probably don’t really understand it. And that’s Feynman’s Razor in action.

Not only would my father explain something as simply as possible, even when his audience was comprised of advanced students or experienced professionals, but he would take that simple explanation and approach it from a different direction, then another, and another, until everyone in the room understood it.

Explaining the same idea or concept simply and from different perspectives cements the learning better in the minds of the listener. If a visual explained something better, my father would use one. He always said you never know what specific explanation will land firmly inside someone’s brain. So why not give them a bunch of explanation options.

A related idea is using the simplest language possible to accurately communicate, especially when attempting to foster a deep understanding. Pepper your writing or speech with nonstop acronyms and academese (see, I should have just said academic language) and you’ll reduce comprehension even in a room one might erroneously assume contains people who understand all those words.

I can’t tell you how often in corporate life I would be in a meeting and someone would toss out an acronym the speaker assumed everyone understood. I worked in software technology, an industry awash in acronyms. I’d quickly tap in a search on acronymfinder.com (bookmark that, it’s a remarkably useful site) to figure out what they were saying.

Read Meyer’s article. Often. Mull over each razor. Think of examples in your life when you see one of them violated or when they might improve your own thinking about a topic. If you do so, your thinking will continually improve.

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