Occam's razor (also spelled Ockham's razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham. Originally a tenet of the reductionist philosophy of nominalism, it is more often taken today as a heuristic maxim that advises economy, parsimony, or simplicity in scientific theories.

Occam's razor states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as:

Furthermore, when multiple competing theories have equal predictive powers, the principle recommends selecting those that introduce the fewest assumptions and postulate the fewest hypothetical entities. It is in this sense that Occam's razor is usually understood.

So, keeping this in mind, do we as paranormal investigators tend to create more “entities” in our pursuit of the truth? Are we out there with our cameras and recorders looking for just the basic of evidence and keeping with his theorem or are we out there creating more evidence than we can actually use.

We as a community of researchers need to stick with this nominalism philosophy. We need more solid evidence that can stand up to scrutiny and less of the “orb” type evidence that can be attributed to everything from rain to dust.

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying that all orbs are dust or moisture, but that is what any skeptic worth his weight in gold will say and that puts one heck of a dark cloud over our already misunderstood research.

Let’s give an example here…let’s say that Group A is on an investigation and they shoot hundreds of photos. On some of those photos we see “orbs”. Now Group A gets all excited about this and submit on their site that they have 25 photographs of paranormal activity. Our great group here has put all of our proverbial butts in the breeze here.

Out of those 25 they could have narrowed it down to a few that would be harder to scrutinize. Even not submitted those at all. We all know that these types of photographs are hardly even accepted in our world, much less in the outside circles of skeptics. So now Group A has giving the wrong impression to the rest of the world that paranormal investigation is nothing more than people with nothing else to do with their nights.

So now that we have a better grasp on Occam’s Razor, we should all use this a motto to live by when we are out there. Let’s give them less to scrutinize and make it harder for them to dismiss this great field of study that we all love and obsess over.