Five philosophical razors for clearer thinking

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a Wikipedia article titled Philosophical razor which defines one as:

 

“a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to eliminate (shave off) unlikely explanations for a phenomenon or avoid unnecessary actions.

 

The best known is Occam’s razor. Wikipedia says that:

 

“In philosophy, Occam’s razor is the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations with the smallest possible set of elements. It is also known as the principle of parsimony or the law of parsimony.”

 

There is a more specific principle called Hanlon’s razor that instead says:  

 

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”

 

On March 23, 2026 I blogged about it in a post titled Stupidity can explain a lot of behavior.

 

And there is Alder’s razor:

 

“If something cannot be settled by experiment or observation, then it is not worthy of debate.”

 

There is Grice’s razor:

 

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

 

There is Hitchens’ razor:

 

“That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

 

An article at Life Lessons is titled 9 Philosophical razors you need to know. Another article by Chris Meyer at The Mind Collection is titled 11 Philosophical razors to simplify your life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

How we describe the solar system is a good example of Occam’s razor. As shown simply above, once we had an earth-centered view using circular orbits. For Geocentrism Wikipedia says:

 

“The resultant system, which eventually came to be widely accepted in the west, seems unwieldy to modern astronomers; each planet required an epicycle revolving on a deferent, offset by an equant which was different for each planet. It predicted various celestial motions, including the beginning and end of retrograde motion, to within a maximum error of 10 degrees, considerably better than without the equant.”

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The modern, simpler, heliocentric version, is shown above. It has elliptical orbits that result from gravitational attraction.

 

 

The razor was adapted from an image at OpenClipart.  The Ptolemaic model and solar system were adapted from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

There are haves and have nots; but there are just two halves, and no halve nots.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you do not proofread, you can get total nonsense. There is a post by Dr. John Livingston at the Gem State Patriot News blog on July 20, 2025 titled Heart and Soul with a second paragraph that begins:

 

“The progressive line has always been that there are halves and halve nots and the halves are always exploiting the halve nots.”

 

No, it has not ever been. Halves is the plural for half. We can get biblical by quoting from Matthew 13:12 in the King James version:

 

“For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.”

 

The cartoon was partly colored in from this one at Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Natural always being better is a fallacy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an article by Amanda Ruggeri at BBC on February 12, 2025 titled Natural doesn’t always mean better: How to spot if someone is trying to convince you with an ‘appeal to nature’. It also was discussed by Steven Novella at Science-Based Medicine on that day in another article titled BBC Takes On Appeal to Nature Fallacy. And there is a Wikipedia page on Appeal to nature.

 

Natural may be terrible. For example, poisonous arsenic can be in well water. There is a web page at the Minnesota Department of Health titled Private Well Protection Arsenic Study with the following information:

 

“Approximately 10 percent of new wells in Minnesota contain arsenic above the drinking water standard. Drinking water with low levels of arsenic over a long time increases the risk of diabetes and increased risk of cancers of the bladder, lungs, liver, and other organs. It can also contribute to cardiovascular and respiratory disease, reduced intelligence in children, and skin problems such as lesions, discolorations, and the development of corns. Health impacts of arsenic may not occur right away and can develop after many years, especially if you are in contact with arsenic at a low level over a long time.

 

Arsenic can be found in groundwater throughout Minnesota, but is more likely in some areas than others, due to the way glaciers moved across Minnesota. Because it has no taste and no odor, testing is the only way to know whether or not a well has arsenic in it. All new wells must be tested for arsenic before being placed in service.”

   

Arsenic can also show up in foods grown in water like rice. In November 2014 there was a Consumer Reports article titled How much arsenic is in your rice? and a long report titled Analysis of Arsenic in Rice and Other Grains. In July 2023 there is an article by Lihchyun Joseph Su, Tung-Chin Chiang, and Sarah N O’Connor at Frontiers in Nutrition titled Arsenic in brown rice: do the benefits outweigh the risks?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How about poisonous plants, for which Wikipedia has a web page. And the Wikipedia page about Cassava discusses how there is cyanide in bitter cassava (manihot esculenta).

 

What about fish? There is a Wikipedia page about poisonous fish. The Wikipedia page on the Fugu (pufferfish) says it can be deadly if not properly prepared, as shown in a YouTube video from The Simpsons.

 

The adapted water warning sign and Poison Garden gates are from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Quack Quack: the threat of pseudoscience, a 2022 book by Dr. Joe Schwarcz

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joe Schwarcz is a professor at McGill University in Montreal. He directs the McGill Office for Science and Society (OoSS), writes a newspaper column titled The Right Chemistry in the Montreal Gazette, and is the author of numerous books. His most recent book is Quack Quack: The Threat of Pseudoscience. I saw a review of it by the late Harriet Hall at Science Based Medicine on January 3, 2023. None of the public libraries in the Treasure Valley bought a copy, so I recently did at Amazon. Most of the chapters in the book are about three pages long, and thus easy to read. They typically had appeared as articles, either at the web site for the McGill Office for Science and Society or columns in the Montreal Gazette (sometimes accompanied by YouTube videos). Here are five examples from the book.

 

My favorite article, on pages 144 to 147, is titled The Curious “Science” of Oscillococcinum, and also appeared on March 20, 2017 at OoSS, and in a YouTube Video from the Montreal Gazette titled Dr. Joe Schwarcz: He’s no quack. That product is a homeopathic remedy for flu-like symptoms produced by Boiron - made from the liver and heart of a duck. Those ‘meats’ are diluted by a factor of a hundred in water, and the process repeated 200 times. Then the solution is dripped onto sugar pellets. The so-called ‘active ingredient’ is present at a ludicrously small level – one in ten to the four-hundredth power.

 

I was disgusted to find Oscillococcinum on sale at my local Walgreens pharmacy. The package and web site say the allegedly inactive ingredients are lactose and sucrose, and cryptically describe the active ingredient in Latin just as:

“Anas barbariae 200CK – To reduce the duration and severity of flu-like symptoms”

 

Right before it, on Pages 142 to 144 is another article titled Natural Fallacies, which you can also find at the Montreal Gazette on September 30, 2016 as an article titled The Right Chemistry: “Natural is better’ is a myth, and a five-minute YouTube video titled Dr. Joe Schwarcz on the misuse of the word natural.

 

Yet another article on pages 83 to 85 on a silly gizmo is titled Alpha Spin Can Make Your Head Spin. It had appeared at the Montreal Gazette on August 2, 2019 as an article titled The Right Chemistry: Secret to longevity can’t be bought online. There is a three-minute YouTube video titled Dr. Joe Schwarcz on the questionable miracle of the “Alpha Spin.” 

 

Still another article on pages 91 to 93 is titled Jilly Juice. It also had appeared in the Montreal Gazette on June 1, 2018 as an article titled The Right Chemistry: Beware of self-proclaimed health experts and as a four-minute YouTube video titled Dr. Joe Schwarcz: Don’t buy the cabbage juice hype.

 

And finally, on pages 174 to 178, there is an article titled Medical Medium. It also had appeared in the Montreal Gazette on March 1, 2019 as an article titled The Right Chemistry: No, celery juice is not a cure-all and as a four-and-a-half minute YouTube video titled Dr. Joe Schwarcz on celery juice and “miracle” cures. (Watch Joe's right thumb!)

 

What is missing here?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday Randall Munroe published an xkxd web cartoon (shown above) titled Contiguous 41 States. Most Americans immediately will say that’s wrong, there should be 48 of them. But the map superficially seems ok, and it’s surprisingly hard to tell what he left off. Actually he skipped the entire column with North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. He also slid over the adjacent states to eliminate Delaware, New Mexico and Pennsylvania.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can see what he did by comparing with the correct map shown above. Or you could cheat and look the cartoon up at Explain xkcd.

   

Doesn’t everybody make their hamburgers exactly the same way we do?

Obviously the one and only right way to make a hamburger is to grill a quarter-pound (~110 gram) ground beef patty (flipping it once), and then serve it on a 4” (100 mm) diameter bun. But that’s a dangerous fallacy.

Even right here in Boise Big Juds is well-known for serving one-pound beef burgers on double-sized buns. Over at Carl’s Jr. you can find a plant-based Beyond Burger and turkey burgers.

When you look in the frozen-foods section of a supermarket, you also will find the little 2-1/2” square White Castle ‘sliders’ with five holes, as shown above. They were steam-grilled on a bed of chopped onions and never ever flipped.

In New Mexico the default is a green chile cheeseburger. In Salt Lake City, the cheeseburgers also include pastrami. See the Serious Eats article titled Salt Lake City: Tracking Utah’s Pastrami Burger at Crown Burger which says “Greek immigrants in a Mormon town take an all-American food and top it with Jewish luncheon meat.” Near Oklahoma City they mash ribbons of onion right into the meat patty, as is described in a Parade magazine article titled Try Oklahoma’s famous fried onion burger.

There is no one right way. The hamburger image came from Len Rizzi at the National Cancer Institute.

Why the ‘I turned out fine’ argument just is a fallacy

An excellent article by Justin Coulson in The New York Times on November 27, 2018 discussed The fallacy of the ‘I turned out fine’ argument. It reminded me of a 2-minute comedy routine by Patton Oswalt titled The Parental Defense which you can watch on YouTube:

Mom: “You used to scream all night, (when) we didn’t feed you. You turned out fine.”

Patton: (wanted to say) “I didn’t turn out fine. I’m a fat comedian with OCD. I get up in front of strangers and talk about my dick. This is not good parenting.”

Literally blowing smoke

Until last month I had assumed that the phrase “blowing smoke up your behind” was figurative (meaning insincere compliments) rather than literal. Then on the new books shelf at my friendly local public library I found a book by Lydia King and Nate Pedersen titled Quackery: A brief history of the worst ways to cure everything. On pages 88 and 89 was a section titled Blowing Smoke Up Your Arse which described how in 18th century London tobacco smoke enemas were used to try and resuscitate drowned people. The article was illustrated by a photograph of a kit from the Wellcome Collection (with a bellows as shown above) and a captioned diagram showing the parts and how they were assembled. I have added another Wellcome Collection illustration of the assembled device (which coyly omits the nozzle). There was an organization known as The Institution for Affording Immediate Relief to Persons Apparently Dead from Drowning (which later became the Royal Humane Society). There even is a four-minute YouTube video titled Tobacco resuscitation kit: a smoke enema to save your life? It describes the theoretical basis of four humours.

There also was a magazine article by Sterling Haynes on Tobacco Smoke Enemas in the December 2012 issue of the BC Medical Journal (on pages 496 and 497). He said that in 1811 English scientist Ben Brodie discovered that nicotine was toxic to the heart, so smoke enemas soon became unfashionable. Via PubMed I found another article titled A history of the medicinal use of tobacco 1492 – 1860 by Grace G. Stewart in the July 1967 issue of Medical History (pages 228 to 268) with a better description (page 244) of how blowing smoke went from literal to figurative:

“Dr. (Daniel) Legare put the final touch upon the practice of injecting smoke into a patient’s intestinal canal to resuscitate the apparently drowned, when he presented his inaugural dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania in 1805, recording the results of his experiments upon animals with the rectal insufflation of tobacco smoke and demonstrating thereby that this mode of procedure was of no value as a means of resuscitation. The discontinuance of the practice of using tobacco smoke for this particular purpose did not mean that physicians abandoned the practice for other purposes, however, for it was continued until 1860 and possibly later.”

A colossal conspiracy called the Mandela Effect

Some people have very curious beliefs. The so-called Mandela Effect is a belief originated by Fiona Broome. She remembered that Nelson Mandela died in prison back in the 1980s rather than in 2013 (after having become much more famous because he was elected President of South Africa in 1994 and served for five years).

Wikipedia hasn’t bothered with a separate page for the Mandela Effect. It instead appears as the last heading in the page on Confabulation that says:

“An internet meme related to confabulation is known as the Mandela effect. This is a situation where a number of people have memories that are different from the available evidence. The term was coined by paranormal enthusiast Fiona Broome, who says she and other people remember Nelson Mandela dying in the 1980’s rather than in 2013. She argues that common memories which appear mistaken could be explained by the existence of parallel universes that are able to interact with each other. A common thread of discussion regarding this ‘effect‘ is misremembering the Berenstain Bears being spelled as ‘Berenstein Bears‘. “  

The first few moments of a YouTube video by Dr. Druanna Johnson titled What is happening to our current reality! Mandela Effect?? gives some other examples, like at 1:05 that department store J. C. Penney was originally spelled Penny, and at 1:20 that Oscar Mayer originally was spelled Myer. Did either name really change? No!

I looked in the EBSCO databases on my friendly local public library web site, and instead found a .pdf file of an article in the April 1930 Harvard Business Review by  David R. Falk titled Central Buying by Department-Store Mergers which referred to the J.C. Penney Co.

When I searched in Wikimedia Commons, I found both a 1936 photo of an Oscar Mayer  Wienermobile, and a 1948 ad from the Ladies Home Journal for Oscar Mayer Wieners.

On July 24, 2016 Snopes had an article by David Emery on The Mandela Effect that said The Glitch Is in Your Memory, Not the Matrix. There also is a web site about Debunking Mandela Effects, and an article at the Rational Wiki.   

I know that my memory isn’t always reliable. Ask any prosecutor or forensic engineer what they think of eyewitness testimony, and watch them chuckle. For example, here in Boise there is a personal injury law firm that often runs TV ads (which I typically don’t pay close attention to and mute). If you’d asked me I’d have told you their name was Lister Frost, but it actually is Litser Frost.  

An image of a mandala found at Wikimedia Commons was colored in.

Learning to Recognize Fallacies and Bad Arguments

When you write a speech, you should avoid logical fallacies and other bad arguments. Wikipedia has a page with a long List of Fallacies. Also, last January I blogged about An Infographic Showing Rhetorical Fallacies.

Recently online I found An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments by Ali Almossawi, which has amusing cartoons about this serious topic.

Five bad arguments came up before the last presidential election, as was discussed by Scott Neuman in A Guide to Spotting Pretzel Logic on the Campaign Trail. Both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney graduated from the Harvard Law School, so their campaigns also should have known better.

In March 2008 Paul Graham posted an essay on How to Disagree that listed a hierarchy which was linked to by the CreateDebate blog and illustrated  with a pyramid, as shown above.

The image of two arguing men was derived from an old Federal Art Project poster about More Courtesy.