Talk:Phenomenon

Hello Larry. I see you wrote the comments below after I did a minor grammatical alteration (I had nothing to do with the original article). (I just edited one of yours that was "completely shot through with error"; see "linear models".) (Did you have anything to do with "linear regression"? I rather drastically rewrote that one a few days ago.) -- Mike Hardy

I don't understand. I didn't write linear models or linear regression. I don't know much about either one of those topics, and would never think of doing any substantive edits to them.

Aha--I looked at the history. I moved Linear Model to linear model ages ago--the guy who had been writing zillions of statistics articles, in the early days, put them under capitalized page titles.

Nice try. :-) --Larry Sanger

I believe this article should be deleted, for the following reasons.

The first line is simply false in every claim it makes:

In philosophy, a Phenomenon is an observable event caused by a hypothetical object known as a noumenon.

No, in philosophy, there simply is no generally accepted use for 'phenomenon'. It's a technical term in Kant's philosophy, and it is used as a very vague term meaning roughly "appearance" or "object of perception"; sometimes it's pressed into service for more specialized (i.e., more clearly-defined) uses.

Noumena are detectable only if they cause phenomena.

This is just completely false as Kant scholarship. That wasn't Kant's view. There's also no philosopher that I know of who endorses this precise view in this precise language, that I know of.

The rest of the article is shot through and through with similar very basic mistakes. I'm boldly removing it, pending a discussion of the problems with it.

There's a basic error in writing articles like this: there is no general topic of study that goes under the name "phenomenon." The fact that this is a useful (though very vague and ambiguous) English word, that is used in a lot of theorizing, does not mean that there is a body of theorizing that is attached to it, that deserves an encyclopedia article. In fact, there isn't, as far as I can tell. Virtually all of the following should (and indeed already does) belong on pages like science, scientific method, and Immanuel Kant.

This isn't to deny that we need an article such as phenomenon (Kantian philosophy)--but that's a relatively well-defined piece of jargon that is the subject of a great deal of specific scholarship.

--Larry Sanger

In philosophy, a Phenomenon is an observable event caused by a hypothetical object known as a noumenon. Noumena are detectable only if they cause phenomena.

Noumena and Phenomena provide a major part of the logical underpinnings of the scientific method and thus form the basis of science and engineering. Often technology exploits some phenomenon. It is possible to list the phenomena which are relevant to almost any field of endeavor, for example, in the case of optics and light one can list observable phenomena under the topic optical phenomenon.

The possibilities are many, for example:

Some observable events are commonplace, some require delicate manipulation of expensive and sensitive equipment. Some are significant experiments which led to groundbreaking discoveries.

There is a class of phenomena which lie outside generally accepted knowledge which knowledgable scientists tend to discount. They are collected and discussed under the topic anomalous phenomena.

While I agree with Larry's evaluation that this original article was pretty bad, I disagree that there shouldn't be an article here. There certainly shouldn't be an article titled "Phenomenon" in a general paper encyclopedia, but I think the habits and expectations of the users of Wikipedia are such that some dictionary-like entries are warranted. The major factor, I think, is the search box. People type words into a search box, and if there's an article titled by that word alone, they will gravitate toward that as their first place to look. Such words, then, should have brief articles describing how the word is used in various contexts, with links to real articles.

Of course, most of the links in the existing article are irrelevant, because they are simple examples of the ordinary, everyday dictionary meaning of the word, so there's no need to collect them. But certainly a simple entry along the lines of "Here's what the word means in ordinary English, and here's how certain philosophers have used it in specific contexts..." is not out of place.

As to which English words deserve such entries and which don't, I think the determining factor is whether or not the word does have some very-specific jargon meanings in one or more narrow contexts; those are the kinds of things a dictionary wouldn't cover. --LDC

I could actually agree with the second to last paragraph here--it entirely depends on how it were done--but in any case, I wouldn't say it's a huge priority. Every ordinary term occasionally used as jargon in every field could be given the treatment described, I guess. --Larry Sanger

I have restored material which links to other pages which are useful. Fredbauder 20:16 Oct 25, 2002 (UTC)