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WillowOne's Positions

Alder's Razor

"What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating." - Mike Alder

Overview

Alder's razor, or Newton's flaming laser sword, is the principle that a question which cannot in principle be settled by observation or experiment is not worth arguing about. It was coined by the Australian mathematician Mike Alder in "Newton's Flaming Laser Sword, or: Why Mathematicians and Scientists don't like Philosophy but do it anyway", Philosophy Now 46 (2004). Alder named it after Isaac Newton, as the attitude he took to be Newton's own, and described it as "much sharper and more dangerous than Occam's Razor", since it cuts away not merely unnecessary entities but whole classes of question.

It is a more extreme version of the Empiricist principle: where the logical positivists said that unverifiable statements were meaningless, Alder says only that they are not worth the time.

Notes

  • Alder was half joking, and said so. Applied strictly, the razor removes ethics, most of mathematics and the razor itself, none of which can be settled by experiment. He presented it as the working attitude of scientists rather than a theory of meaning.
  • Its proper use is as a question to ask before a debate rather than a rule for ending one: what observation would settle this, and if none would, what are we arguing about? That is also the question Popper's Razor asks of a theory and Street Epistemology asks of a belief.
  • Much of Metaphysics fails the test, and some of it survives it: everyone who does science presupposes an external, regular world, and that is a metaphysical commitment that no experiment can establish. See My Presuppositions.

Also see

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Alder

Sources