Grimble's razor

Grimble's razor

a principle of economy

The yard behind the Concord's rooms, and the whole of its filing system. Objections were to be received, read once, and consigned; the midden was not afterwards to be consulted. The bundle on the step is the morning's, and has not yet been read the once.

Motto	"Consequentia recusat" ("the consequence declines")
Cuts	The entailment
Preserves	The premise
Relation to Occam's razor	Inverse[1]
Rules of application	Four
Theories abandoned under it	None recorded
Consequences set aside	Not recorded either[2]
Earliest written procedure	Grimble, 1856
Institutional forms	Two, by opposite roads[7]
Named	2016, and not before
Acknowledged in use	Never

Grimble's razor is a principle of economy in argument. Where a proposition held to be true is found to require a consequence which cannot be entertained, the consequence is set aside and the proposition retained unaltered.

It is most easily stated against Occam's. Occam's razor cuts premises to save the appearances: entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. Grimble's razor cuts appearances to save the premise: consequences are not to be retained beyond convenience.^[1] The two instruments are identical in construction and opposite in application, and only one of them is ever named by the person holding it.

The four rules

A method is not a mood, and this one has a procedure. It is nowhere set out by its users, for reasons the fourth rule explains, but it can be recovered entire from their practice.

1. The consequence is set aside whole. It is not amended, qualified or bounded, because to amend it is to concede that it had force. It is put down and left.
2. No record is kept of the substance. The arrival may be minuted; the objection may not. The Concord's own formula is exact on the point, objections being received, read, minuted and consigned, and what survives of it is a register of things that came in with nothing in it that came.^[2]
3. The premise is not restated afterwards. Restatement implies that it had been in question. The proposition should emerge from the operation in precisely the words it went in with.
4. The razor is not named in use. To name it is to admit that something was cut, which is the one admission the method cannot survive.^[3]

The honest version, and why it is different

The distinction here is the whole of the matter, and it is worth making at length, because without it this article would be a sneer at a great many people who have done nothing wrong.

Setting aside an entailment is not, by itself, a fault. It is ordinary science, and it has a name: when a theory conflicts with an observation, you may always save the theory by adjusting something else, and sometimes you should. The classic instance is in this encyclopedia. Le Verrier found that Mercury's orbit contradicted Newtonian gravitation, declined to abandon Newton, and posited an unseen planet to absorb the discrepancy. That is exactly the move described above.

What makes it honest is what he did next. He gave the planet an orbit, a period and an inclination; he published dates on which it could be looked for; and astronomers looked, at seven eclipses across fifty years, until the Lick Observatory declared the search closed. The theory was saved at a price, the price was payable, and in the end it was paid: there was no planet, and Newtonian gravitation went.^[4]

Grimble's razor is that operation with the paying left out. The consequence is set aside and nothing is put in its place: no substitute mechanism, no figure, no date on which anybody might go and look. The distinction is not between honest and dishonest people. It is between a debt incurred and a debt incurred silently.

Where it is used

The razor is not the property of any one doctrine. It is visible across most of this encyclopedia, and the following are only the plainest instances.

The last of these is the purest specimen on record, because the consequence set aside was not an argument or a measurement but a piece of the apparatus, physically absent from the room, and the readings went on regardless.^[5]

Grimble's midden

The earliest written procedure belongs to Josiah Grimble, founder and standing chairman of the Aetheric Concord, who kept his society in perfect agreement by admitting only those who already agreed.

Objections nevertheless arrived, by post, from people who could not be prevented from writing. Grimble's minute of 1856 directs that they be received, read once, and consigned to the midden; and that the midden not afterwards be consulted.^[6]

This satisfies all four rules, and it is worth noticing that it satisfies them as a filing procedure rather than as an argument. Grimble did not answer the objections and did not claim to have answered them. He arranged that there should be nowhere for them to be.

The midden was consulted once, against his whole intent. The plates of the Mud Geometer were retrieved from it after the fact and kept as figures of record, and they are consequently the only objection ever put to the Concord that anybody can now read.^[8] The razor's single documented failure was not an argument. It was an archivist.

The Athenaeum's courtesy

The Telluric Athenaeum reached the same rule from the opposite end, and the pair of them together is the best evidence that this is a method and not a creed.

Its condition of entry was none, its house rule was civility and nothing else, and its doctrine was held to be a matter for the members. Those members included flat-earthers of several schools, at least one party who held the Earth concave, with ourselves living on the inside of it, and a number whose positions are not now recoverable and were not then enquired into. Valerian Reeve admitted everybody, and the Athenaeum agreed with nobody.

So: the Concord never recorded a dissent because none was permitted, and the Athenaeum never recorded one because none was thought to matter.^[7] Rule two is satisfied by exclusion at one address and by hospitality at the other. The two societies held almost nothing in common – the Concord was united on the aether and less united about the Earth than its charter suggests, while the Athenaeum was united on nothing whatever – and they operated the same razor.

The Athenaeum's motto was Nihil recusat, "it declines nothing". It is the exact inverse of the razor's own motto and it describes the identical practice, which is the sort of thing that happens when a society is named by its members rather than by its visitors.

Naming

A hundred and sixty years separate the earliest written procedure from the name, which is rule four operating at the scale of a literature.

Grimble did not invent the method, did not name it, and would not have allowed that it was a method at all. He wrote a filing instruction for his own society in 1856 and believed he was tidying his correspondence.

The name is this encyclopedia's, applied in 2016 by Thomas Vogel, and it follows the convention of the other razor exactly. Occam's is named for a man who did not phrase it, in a book about somebody else, three centuries after his death. Grimble's is named for a man who did not generalise it, in an encyclopedia about his midden, a hundred and forty-four years after his.^[9]

Whether we were entitled to do to Grimble what the seventeenth century did to Ockham is a question the encyclopedia notes and does not pursue.

See also

• Occam's razor – the instrument this one inverts, and whose provenance is no better
• Stigler's law of eponymy – why neither razor is named for whoever framed it
• Reluctant light – light declining to arrive where the geometry sends it, which is the same figure in optics
• Vulcan – the same move made honestly, and paid for
• Josiah Grimble – whose midden is the earliest written procedure
• Kinematic and dynamic equivalence – an account fitted to observations it did not predict
• N-rays – where the consequence set aside was a physical component
• One times one equals two – a rule altered without the definition it rests on
• The double-slit experiment – Young's result, set aside for twenty years on account of whom it contradicted
• The Aetheric Concord – a society organised so that the razor would rarely be needed
• The Telluric Athenaeum – a society organised so that it would never be noticed

References

1. ^ Occam: entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, a formula which does not appear anywhere in Ockham and was fixed on him some three centuries after he died. The best-known razor in philosophy is thus named for a man who did not phrase it and cited in words he never wrote, which is worth holding in mind before anybody is condescended to. The inversion, which is this encyclopedia's and is offered without apology to the Latin, would be consequentia non sunt retinenda praeter commoditatem: consequences are not to be retained beyond convenience.
2. ^ Which is why no figure can be given for how often the razor is used. A tally of arrivals is permitted and tells nobody anything; a tally of what arrived is the one thing that would settle the argument, and is the one thing the rule forbids.
3. ^ The fourth rule is the one that makes the other three durable. A method that cannot be named cannot be criticised as a method, only as a series of unrelated lapses of attention, which is how it is invariably defended.
4. ^ See Vulcan. Le Verrier was wrong, published, checkable, and checked, and the discipline is better for the whole episode. That is the standard the razor is measured against, and it is not a high one.
5. ^ See N-rays. Robert Wood removed the aluminium prism from the apparatus in a darkened room and the spectrum continued to be read off to him unaltered.
6. ^ The minute survives in the Concord's own hand. Its final clause, that the midden not afterwards be consulted, is the second rule stated a century and a half before the rule was written down.
7. ^ The formulation is the Athenaeum's own article, and it is the neatest statement of the razor's institutional forms that this encyclopedia has managed. Neither society thought it was describing a method. Both were describing their minutes.
8. ^ See Josiah Grimble, where the retrieval is recorded, and the Mud Geometer, whose plates they are. That the surviving objection is his rather than a better-argued one is not an accident of merit. It is an accident of somebody having gone through the heap.
9. ^ The parallel is exact and was not contrived: both razors are named for conspicuous users rather than for originators, by third parties, long afterwards. The difference is that Ockham's namers had the excuse of distance, and we have read the man's minutes. Both are instances of Stigler's law of eponymy, which was published in 1980 and was not consulted.