Kurt Hunter, the lead character in my Kurt Hunter Mysteries series is special agent in charge of Biscayne National Park. Kurt is a thinker—an investigator rather than a policeman. In compiling a theory for a case, I like to show how he thinks Part of the thought process is using established laws in his reasoning.
I’ve use Ockham’s Razor before. The phrase is credited to an English Friar, William of Ockham died in 1347, but it was several centuries before the quote was attributed to him. In it’s original form, or as close as one can reasonably get, it states:
“Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity"
The modern interpretation is that the simplest solution is generally the best. Different, but the same. It’s a good problem solving tool to have in an investigator’s toolbox.
In Backwater Squall, I found a razor law I had never heard of and created one of my, or Kurt’s own. Here is the opening paragraph of the book:
When faced with a choice between incompetence and deceit, it is usually the former that wins out. I called the rule Hunter’s Razor, derived from Hanlon’s Razor which states that one should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Hanlon’s Razor originally appears in the 1990s in a glossary of computer programming called the Jargon File. The author is not credited but a later entry notes the similarity to a quote from Robert Heinlein in Logic of Empires a novella published in 1941:
“You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity."
From this I derived Hunter’s law, which I will now formally state:
“With a choice between incompetence and deceit, the former will win out.”
Kurt uses the law to eliminate suspects. It is hard to interview innocent people who often, because of nervousness or incompetence, come off as deceitful. Kurt looks at incompetence first, before assuming guilt.
Here are a few more examples of Razor Laws (from Wikipedia).
Hitchens' razor: What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.[citation needed]
Hume's guillotine: What ought to be cannot be deduced from what is. "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."[5][6]
Alder's razor (also known as Newton's Flaming Laser Sword[7]): If something cannot be settled by experiment or observation, then it is not worthy of debate.[7]
Sagan standard: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Popper's falsifiability principle: For a theory to be considered scientific, it must be falsifiable.[8]
Grice's razor: As a principle of parsimony, conversational implications are to be preferred over semantic context for linguisticexplanations