Five rules of epistemological knowledge

Five useful epistemological razor's. From Wikipedia's definitions.

Occam's razor: When faced with competing hypotheses, select the one that makes the fewest assumptions.

Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Hume's razor: Do not multiply necessities without good reason.

Hitchens' razor: The burden of proof or onus in a debate lies with the claim-maker, and if he or she does not meet it, the opponent does not need to argue against the unfounded claim. Or as Hitchens put it, "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

Adler's razor: If something cannot be settled by experiment then it is not worthy of debate.

Ho Hah - Hitchen, Occam, Hanlon, Adler, Hume

With regard to Adler's razor, I like his observation.

As a mathematician, I take care not to be caught doing philosophy. When I buy my copy of Philosophy Now, I ask the newsagent to wrap it up in a brown paper bag in the hope that it will be mistaken for a girly-mag.

I am not alone in this, most scientists and mathematicians regard philosophy as somewhere between sociology and literary criticism, both ranking well below, say, kissing slugs on the list of healthy activities in which one might indulge before dinner.

[snip]

Not even Newton was a complete newtonian, and it may be doubted if life generally offers the luxury of not having an opinion on anything that cannot be reduced to predicate calculus plus certified observation statements. While the newtonian insistence on ensuring that any statement is testable by observation (or has logical consequences which are so testable) undoubtedly cuts out the crap, it also seems to cut out almost everything else as well. Newton’s Laser Sword should therefore be used very cautiously. On the other hand, when used appropriately, it transforms philosophy into something where problems can be solved, and definite and often surprising conclusions drawn.

It might be worth noting that Hume's razor, "Do not multiply necessities without good reason" (in the original, "it
being an inviolable maxim in philosophy, that where any particular cause is sufficient for an effect, we ought to rest satisfied with it, and ought not to multiply causes without necessity" from A Treatise of Human Nature) is in many ways a variant of the Einstein Principle summarized as "A scientific theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler." The actual original statement is

It can scarcely be denied that 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.
- "On the Method of Theoretical Physics" in his Herbert Spencer Lecture