User talk:Biogeographist/Archive 1

A belated welcome!
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Again, welcome! Apparition11 Complaints/ Mistakes 18:39, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

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RiskAoA vs multiple-criteria decision-making methods
RiskAoA is similar only in goal. These tools involve no new technology or approaches that an educated person couldn't use or derive. Most are linear, and especially are "garbage in, garbage out." One of the amazing things about RiskAoA is that errors with data are not reflected in the results, it extracts the goodness from data, and the badness cancels, garbage goes in, but useful information comes out. It does require reasonable information fidelity, it can't make miracles, or withstand deliberate spoofing. But none of those tools, the linear parameterization tools, the fuzzy logic, etc., involve application of any novel techniques.

Weighted models, can not predict. RiskAoA can, it does not use weights. Fuzzy is essential a way of artificially increasing accuracy with artificial chaos and artificially increasing number. ELECTRE could greatly enhance RiskAoA, if one wished to invest the time, though I am not sure that there would be much benefit. The others seem to be exactly the kinds of models I complained about in our other conversations. Linear factors, added together, they usefully keep track of many details, but don't do anything else extraordinary.

I can't tell you how RiskAoA works, but I may be able to satisfy your curiosity.GESICC (talk) 23:35, 12 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the note, which sounds very interesting, but I am still very skeptical because there is a lot that I don't understand and I don't have any published sources that I could consult to understand better the magic you are describing. I also don't understand why RiskAoA would be so magical when [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Decision-making&diff=733405181&oldid=733392329 the list of RiskAoA's steps that you added to the article on decision-making] do not sound magical or innovative. There's no way to verify the novelty of RiskAoA in comparison to whatever the most comparable methods might be.


 * I'm also skeptical that you present RiskAoA as being in a class by itself and there is no way to verify that claim either. For example, the article on [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Risk_management_tools&oldid=734243010 risk management tools] begins with a sentence written by you that currently reads: "There are three distinct types of risk tools: Two are identified by their approach, Capital asset pricing model (CAP-M) and RiskAoA, and the third, Probabilistic risk assessment (PRA), is the mainstay of project risk management." The same classification is stated in the [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=RiskAoA&oldid=734089542#Risk_Approaches risk approaches] section of the RiskAoA article. No reliable source is provided for this classification, which makes it look like original research (prohibited in Wikipedia), but apart from that problem, this classification presents RiskAoA not merely as a Microsoft Excel-based software package but as a whole class of tools. There is no support for this idea in any of the available sources on RiskAoA.


 * If there are any other published sources you can recommend that I can read to learn more, no matter how general they may be, please share them. Biogeographist (talk) 02:38, 13 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Really, you don't understand it and so you want it to go away?  You do have sources you can consult.  Ask the program office.  As to inputs not being spectacular, well, they are far above pro/con, +/-, and it's not the people in the vehicle that determine what it does, but whether it's a space shuttle, plane, car or bike.  As to unique tools for risk, you can understand that easily:  One determines if you need a new project, one determines which project is most likely to succeed, and the third manage your risks for components of the project. This is also how the out puts are different.  GESICC (talk) 14:20, 13 August 2016 (UTC)


 * The first sentence (or question) in your response doesn't make any sense to me. As for the rest: I completely understand the conceptual distinctions you are making, but: (1) Those distinctions appear to be original research because they are not supported by a reliable, published source, to my knowledge. (2) You are saying that RiskAoA is the only tool that "determines which project is most likely to succeed", but other organizations also have tools that they use to determine which projects are most likely to succeed: for example, quantitative multiple scenario tools, qualitative scenario analysis, and case-based decision analysis combined with information aggregation tools. (3) The fact that all you can do is tell me to call the program office highlights the lack of information available about RiskAoA and how it compares to other tools. Thanks, Biogeographist (talk) 21:10, 13 August 2016 (UTC)


 * You keep saying that the US Air Force, the Defense Acquisition University, etc., etc., is not a reliable source. In this you are incorrect.  Also, show me these other tools that use a trade-space of risk to enable decisions, because that is the claim, but if you can show a project management tool that operated in that larger regime, that isn't simply accounting, I'd be very interested.  That you keep bring up non-sequitur tools, sans naming them is unhelpful.  In addition, you can verify that RiskAoA is distribution B, which means that is is notable for those reasons, AND information is understandably unavailable, just as if it were Secret.  Are you attempting to elicit unlawful information? GESICC (talk) 21:26, 13 August 2016 (UTC)


 * The answer to your last question is: No; I am asking for publicly available information. I never said that the US Air Force, Defense Acquisition University, and other parts of the US government are not reliable sources. The issue we are discussing at Articles for deletion/RiskAoA is that, for purposes of determining notability, they are not independent secondary sources. The classes of tools I mention are just my general knowledge from reading about decision support systems; I am not an expert in this area. I will look for specific examples of implementation. I don't know of another tool that uses a tradespace of risk in particular. Biogeographist (talk) 21:44, 13 August 2016 (UTC)


 * I also mention that being Distribution B is an indicator of notability. One that puts a straight-jacket on other forms of notoriety, but does itself make what is ascribed it notable, it it a technology worthy of Distribution B. GESICC (talk) 23:35, 13 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Hmm, I will have to think about the argument that "being Distribution B is an indicator of notability". I don't know. In any case, I am learning a lot from this discussion and will continue to learn, so thanks for that. Biogeographist (talk) 00:47, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

Are you familiar with Decision Dashboard? It too is Microsoft Excel-based decision support software that its creator claims "is an ideal decision making tool for Analysis of Alternatives and Alternative Analysis two governemental [sic] methods used to manage acquisition costs". It can be downloaded here if you are not already familiar with it. I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on how it compares to RiskAoA. I am also compiling a list of sources on other comparable decision support software, but I still need to read all the sources to determine which ones are relevant. Biogeographist (talk) 18:06, 21 August 2016 (UTC)
 * I think I was asked to review it years ago and gave it a thumbs up. I think AFRL disagreed with my assessment.  It looks like it has been re-engineered since then.  I believed the utilization of thresholds was an excellent innovation (assuming it's the same tool), which I heartily endorsed.  But compare it to RiskAoA? they used different trade-offs in the approach.  Dave's is an excellent classical approach, but involves no new technology, for example.  GESICC (talk) 23:18, 21 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Well, as I've said elsewhere, there is a big opportunity for you to explain more clearly, in a published article or book, and beyond the very general statements you have made above, why the technology you developed for RiskAoA is such a technological advance over the techniques used in, e.g., Decision Dashboard or other comparable techniques. I realize that such an explanation may have to wait until the DoD approves wider distribution. Biogeographist (talk) 17:20, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

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article
placed it in italics b/c its a quote, however if you feel differently, that's ok...--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 20:08, 18 January 2017 (UTC)


 * See : "For quotations, use only quotation marks (for short quotations) or block quoting (for long ones), not italics. (See Quotations below.) This means that (1) a quotation is not italicized inside quotation marks or a block quote just because it is a quotation, and (2) italics are no substitute for proper quotation formatting." There are a few exceptions (see, e.g., Template:Verse translation) but not in this case. Biogeographist (talk) 21:07, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

Proposed "cafe" merge
You may be interested in Talk:Knowledge café. Yaris678 (talk) 13:53, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

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Please take a look at my last edit
See my last entry in why editors are leaving wikipedia as it has some suggestions for you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Icantevennnnn (talk • contribs) 11:54, 14 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Instead of writing this message on my talk page, perhaps in [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Why_is_Wikipedia_losing_contributors_-_Thinking_about_remedies&diff=prev&oldid=770263823 an indirect attempt to call me a "deletionist"], you could instead self-reflect on the fact that two different editors independently reverted your edit, and you could contemplate the great likelihood that this fact indicates that your edit was deficient in some aspects, and not that the other editors are "deletionists". (In other words, the problem was in the content of your own edit, and not in the behavior of the other editors.) You could have used this opportunity to ask me more about what was deficient about your edit and about how you could improve; if you had, you might have learned something. Learning is, after all, the purpose of Wikipedia. Some of the problems with [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meaning_of_life&diff=prev&oldid=770132920 your edit that I reverted] were: it was unsourced (lack of reliable sources); the logical links between sentences were insufficiently clear, giving the passage the flavor of a non sequitur; I could see no warrant for including the passage in the section on postmodernism; as I mentioned in my edit summary, the deleted passage did not clarify the meaning of the section, and Einstein was completely out of place in the section. If you wish to add a passage about "the human body and the meaning of life" to the page again, I recommend that you should provide better argumentation, cite reliable sources, avoid original synthesis of published material, rely less on quotations, and link to the article on embodied cognition, which seems to be highly relevant. Biogeographist (talk) 13:44, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

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NLP AFD
Hi, as somebody who has contributed occasionally to articles on neuro-linguistic programming I wondered if you could have a look at this AfD, which is not getting much attention. Famous dog   (c) 07:57, 12 July 2017 (UTC)


 * I will comment on the AfD, although I will note here that my only edit to the article in question was a minor correction of capitalization; I have no interest in NLP, nor have I made substantial contributions to articles on NLP as far as I can see. Biogeographist (talk) 19:54, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

Re: Proposed deletion of Definitions of mindfulness
Thanks for your involvement on the talk page. I'm afraid I don't understand the process under which this page is scheduled to be deleted: it does not appear to be either a PROD or an AfD. What is supposed to happen and when? Where should discussion take place? &mdash; Charles Stewart (talk) 17:38, 8 November 2017 (UTC)


 * Sure, it's a standard WP:PROD; the article will be deleted by an administrator in a week if it is not stopped. You can stop it by removing the template if you wish, but if you stop the proposed deletion and the reason for deletion (WP:DEL5) is not satisfactorily addressed, then I will make sure that the article goes to WP:AFD. I also looked at the article you created about Culadasa and obviously it needs a lot of work (if he is notable): I especially note the lack of dates: When was he born? Where has he lived and when? When did he get his degrees? When did he begin practicing Buddhism? When was he authorized as a Buddhist teacher? When did he start his business? When did he publish his books? etc. Articles on famous modern Buddhist teachers include this kind of information. I suggest that you should also remove all the red links from the article on Culadasa, since I doubt that any of the subjects that are redlinked are notable. At this point in the development of Wikipedia, always write the articles first before adding links to new articles. Biogeographist (talk) 18:42, 8 November 2017 (UTC)


 * Re PROD: I will try to look for a solution on the talk page - possibly finding a few well-sourced definitions of mindfulness will suffice to let the article survive.
 * Re notability: The bed and breakfast has received reviews in two reliable sources (newspapers that have national prominence in the US), so I think it meets the notability threshold, although I will delete the redlinks for now. Culadasa's qualifications as a Buddhist teacher are well-documented on the web, so I can add those. &mdash; Charles Stewart (talk) 08:11, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

Political geography
Note that my edit to the Political geography article which you reverted as "sourced to a monograph cited without page numbers" at least was sourced. The whole article is written without a single reference cited inline, not to mention page numbers. Cloud200 (talk) 19:47, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Noted. It's certainly true that the article needs inline refs. I agree that book is an interesting source that could have a place somewhere in the article (such as the history section), but it is an error to label all political geography as pseudoscientific based on that book, which is about an earlier era. Biogeographist (talk) 23:41, 29 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Well, one of the points raised by the book was that "geopolitics" and "political geography" are so vague that they almost lost any meaning today. How can you reasonably discuss a term that incorporates anything from MacKinder, through Dugin to "common sense international politics"? And that view is present in many contemporary sourcs on geopolitics, including Gogwilt (which is really a collection of articles by many authors), Dudley and others. Cloud200 (talk) 06:45, 30 November 2017 (UTC)
 * The vagueness of the term and the variety of methods to which it refers seems comparable to the situation of human geography in general, and political geography should be discussed in the larger context of human geography, it seems to me. Such discussion requires extensive knowledge of the literature, which may be why the article is such poor shape: those who have the requisite extensive knowledge appear to have better things to do than edit the Wikipedia article on political geography. This is the kind of article that would benefit from a class assignment in an upper-level college geography course supervised by a geographer who specializes in this subject. Biogeographist (talk) 13:22, 30 November 2017 (UTC)

Adding "Cruelty to animals" category in Animal Testing article
Your opinion is sought here:. Rasnaboy (talk) 08:11, 12 January 2018 (UTC)

FYI
Just so as you're aware, this is not true. Ask him for diffs and you will find him wanting (I am "user A"). You wrote, "I have not looked at your edit history to examine what happened, but based only on what you have said above, I would point out that being an admin gives an editor special powers that would be easy to abuse. We all make mistakes, and it's a fairly widespread ethical principle that when you see that you have made a mistake (or misdeed), you acknowledge (confess and expose) the mistake, feel remorse for having made the mistake, vow to learn from the mistake and not to repeat it in the future, and take action to remedy the effects of the mistake." Sage advice. Then you wrote, "It sounds like you have done all that." In fact, he's done nothing of the sort (see User talk:Nagualdesign for more details). nagualdesign 13:37, 27 January 2018 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the note. When I uttered my sage advice I was responding to a request for comment on the general topic of "NVC and Wikipedia", and I hadn't investigated the details of the incident at all, so I apologize if my subsequent assumption "It sounds like you have done all that" was incorrect. I hope that further arbitration brings a satisfactory outcome. Biogeographist (talk) 23:24, 27 January 2018 (UTC)


 * No apology is necessary. I can see that you were well-meaning in your responses. I would also have allowed Sebastian to portray himself however he wishes, rightly or wrongly, but I have to draw the line at being personally misrepresented by him. I do think he was sincere in asking you for advice, he just didn't go about it very honestly. His opening gambit – "Last week I ended up blocking (something I have always avoided!) a user who insisted on his own interpretation of our guidelines (such as WP:CONDUCT)." – betrays the fact that he does not accept what everyone else has tried to tell him; that there was no breach of WP:CONDUCT or any other guidelines whatsoever. I think he's probably feeling like we're ganging up on him at this point, and still doesn't realize that until this incident I'd had next to no previous interaction with NeilN, for example, who Sebastian assumed I was in cahoots with from the get go. And now that NeilN is on "my side", as it were, it's probably reinforced Sebastian's assumption! Anyway, I appreciate your reply. nagualdesign 23:49, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

URL Protocols
FYI: The  "linking style is obsolete and should no longer be used" (Source: Help:Link). Daask (talk) 12:04, 9 February 2018 (UTC)


 * Yes, I saw your edit on the NVC article. Many thanks, that's important to know, and I didn't realize that the guideline had changed. Biogeographist (talk) 12:06, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

Jeffrey Beall
I've reverted your change. The time to point out minor wording issues and minor details-of-reference issues was in during the week it was on the talk page. The issues you raise are very minor and can be fixed in place. Anah Mikhayhu Leonard (talk) 00:02, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the note, but you can just use ping me (using Template:Reply to, Template:U, etc.) at Talk:Jeffrey Beall where this is being discussed; there is no need to notify me here. Biogeographist (talk) 01:06, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

Thank you
Thank you for the advice. I will be grateful if you can also provide me with pointers for the future. best regards! — Preceding unsigned comment added by LOBOSKYJOJO (talk • contribs) 00:35, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Apologies and comment
First, and absolutely foremost, I am sincerely sorry that "uninformed user" came across as a personal attack. I did not intend to attack you with that comment. I was just trying to get what I believed was information across. Upon reflection, I can see how that would be perceived as a personal attack. I regret that I did not see it that way originally, but I will certainly be more mindful in the future. So, again, I am very sorry. Also, thank you for pointing it out and making me a better Wikipedia contributor.

Also, I accidentally undid your addition on the criticism section of the Ontological hermeneutics (hereafter: OH) page. This was indeed an error as I believed that your addition was helpful/useful to the page. (Admittedly, it would have been even if I hadn't seen it that way.) So, I re-added it and gave you credit in the edit explanation. If you know a way to undo my "undo" and my fix, so that it's obvious that the only edit history is yours, please do so.

Regarding our dilemma on the OH intro section. I added a line that I hope will clarify why the part you keep removing should be there. Please review. If you still don't like it, I humbly request that you discuss it with me before just removing it. I would be happy to work something out between you and I about how the information can be in the article in a way that is acceptable to both of us. Thank you, for your time. Urstadt —Preceding undated comment added 17:22, 11 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the clarification! I'll respond about the article content on the article talk page. Biogeographist (talk) 04:29, 12 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Well, I guess I will just have to live with the compromise. You left more in than you originally took out in March. For that I am truly grateful. I am still deeply saddened that you serve as the sole arbitrator of this page.
 * For some background information, I made some contributions to a few psychotherapy pages a while back. A guy on there, Doc James, was consistently reverting my edits. His primary claims, which were almost identical to yours, could be summed up as, "If A says this, and B says this, then you cannot claim C as an interpretation." Essentially, he could not accept that I had information that went against what the rest of the article said. Until I cited word-for-word the exact same information (in small quotations), with references and page numbers to the original authors of the source material. You want to know what his response was? Paraphrasing: "Do not use quotes as Wikipedia is supposed to contain original work. While the source material cannot be original work, the authoring of the Wikipedia articles must be." Then he posted some Wiki policy. If I used my own words, I was drawing C as a conclusion. If I cited the work, I wasn't using my own words. I was in violation one way or the other, with no recourse. So, I ultimately never got to contribute the work. He some how had some monopoly on the page that I could never overcome. I haven't touched that page in several months. All that hard work, just to be overruled by someone else.... for whatever reason.
 * Sadly, that's how I feel right now. Albeit, to a lesser extent than I did with that other page since you seem to be compromising much more. So for that, I do thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Urstadt (talk • contribs) 09:31, 12 June 2018(UTC)


 * Thanks for your gracious response here, and I feel what you're saying; in my experience, it can help to remember that, as the Wikipedia policy on ownership of content says, we don't own any of the content that we contribute to Wikipedia and none of us can individually control how any article turns out, or even whether an article survives at all. It can take a while to adjust one's expectations to Wikipedia's radically collaborative approach to encyclopedic content creation. (It may be a good way to come to understand "radical relational ontology"!) An article about this that I like and recommend is: Biogeographist (talk) 14:29, 12 June 2018 (UTC)

Resource for you
Go read Messer, S. B., Sass, L. A., & Woolfolk, R. L. (Eds.). (1988). Hermeneutics and psychological theory: Interpretive perspectives on personality, psychotherapy, and psychopathology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Ontological hermeneutics spelled out crystal clear on. pp. 4, 12-21.

If you really were familiar with continental philosophy, yoy wouldn't have removed ontological hermeneutics from the psychology side bar several months ago, claiming that it isn't even a keyword in psychology when the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology has been publishing about it for over 30 years. Because you would already know that. You would understand that Martin Heidegger is why we have ontological hermeneutics. You would know that William James was first to bring it to America. You would know that Sigmound Freud was the first to use it. You would also know that over half of those references are legit. But you don't know all that, and that is why we are where we are. And the source I referenced at the start of this message will prove it to you. You just have an axe to grind because of constructionism, and the claims made by hermeneutics don't sit well with you, so you need to huff and puff and flex your wings. And because I am just some punk teenager who just turned 18 last month, you are going to push me around with all your academic bravdo because you know that I have no way of knowing if you're twisting all that so-called education to your advantage. In fact, you even took advantage of my unlearned, poor writing style to falsely claim this was original work. I only did this to impress my dad and prove that I am more than a high school drop out. And you screwed that up for me. Youre just a powertroll.

There is a little thing called the Dark Triad. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Urstadt (talk • contribs) 15:45, 13 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Discussion of the article Ontological hermeneutics should happen on that article's talk page, but I'll briefly respond to your comment above: I have the book that you recommended above, Hermeneutics and Psychological Theory, and it is an interesting collection of chapters by different authors with varying perspectives on the book's subject (hermeneutics and psychological theory). The introduction by the editors does say on page 4 (emphasis added): "Our formulation partitions the hermeneutic world into three areas: methodological hermeneutics, ontological hermeneutics, and critical hermeneutics." And they elaborate on that formulation in the rest of the introduction. So that categorization is indeed used by the editors in the book's introduction but is not shared by all of the book's contributors. As for your claim above that William James was the first to bring "ontological hermeneutics" to America and that Sigmund Freud was the first to use it, that is certainly not true. It is not true that, as you said above, I just have an axe to grind, nor is it true, as you said above, that the claims made by hermeneutics don't sit well with me. Those speculations are not implied by anything I have written. I have not done anything to "push you around" as you said above; as I said at Talk:Ontological hermeneutics: my intention here is to improve Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's guidelines and policies, as I do with any other article, and I think everything I have said here upholds Wikipedia's content and conduct policies. As for what you said above about your off-wiki personal life, that's none of my business. I'm not sure how to interpret your last sentence, but I hope it is not a personal attack: WP:No personal attacks. Biogeographist (talk) 16:53, 13 June 2018 (UTC)


 * You are completely wrong about everything in your last response except one thing: my personal life is none of your business. And how would you know that William James was or was not the first to bring hermeneutics to America? You removed it from the psychology side bar because, as you claimed, it wasn't even a keyword or relevant to psychology. Your ignorance of the material is evident to me. You may be able to pass off on your page that you know what you're talking about with OH, but I know you don't. You are selectively picking citations that suit you. Read pages 12-21! And, you conveniently ignored the part of my response last night where I told you that the article spells out IN THE FIRST SENTENCE!!!!! That is MERELY a philosophical inquiry APPLIED to psychotherapy!!!! YOU'RE THE ONE who said the article claimed it was more than that!!! How do you think I know you don't know what you're talking about with OH??? You say on the psychology toolbar that it basically doesn't exist in psychology, then you all of a sudden have all of these ontological hermeneutics references, even citing two of them!!! While also saying that I am wrong!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!! I am screen shotting this. Good riddance! I am done talking with you. I am moving on to people who know more about OH. Urstadt (talk) 18:02, 13 June 2018 (UTC)


 * I had already read the pages you refer to, and I stand by what I said in my previous response, and I stand by everything I have said at Talk:Ontological hermeneutics. If you can provide multiple reliable sources that prove that William James was first to bring "ontological hermeneutics" to America, as you claimed above, and that Sigmund Freud was the first to use "ontological hermeneutics", as you claimed above, then please provide the sources. Biogeographist (talk) 21:08, 13 June 2018 (UTC)

Torsten Hägerstrand
Hi, I don't understand your "undoing" of my edit, nor your edit summary, in this article Torsten Hägerstrand. Yes, the university ceased to be called University of Trondheim on Jan 1. 1996, so if Hägerstrand had received his honorary doctorate in 1996, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), as I wrote, would have been the correct name at that time. At it turns out, he received his honorary degree in 1997, not in 1996,(check the cited article) and by then "University of Trondheim" was definitely outdated. Kjersti Lie (talk) 11:28, 30 August 2018 (UTC)


 * Oh no. I confused the columns when I was looking at the diff. I thought you had changed it to Trondheim. My apologies. Biogeographist (talk) 11:33, 30 August 2018 (UTC)


 * Aha! So that was the explanation! I understand, and all is well! :D By the way, at the beginning of the list article List of Honorary Doctors of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (what a title! :D) I wrote that the article: "... shows recipients of an honorary doctorate bestowed by NTNU and its precursors, the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) (1910–1967) and the University of Trondheim (UNiT) (1968–1996)." This was in line with NTNU's own list of honorary doctors Kjersti Lie (talk) 11:47, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Edit Summary
Hey, you messaged me about that messed-up edit summary. It was intentional. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Brobotics Brofessor (talk • contribs) 14:59, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

Relevant to our prior discussions
The video linked below is how I have come to understand my experiences on here, especially with DocJames. But first, I spoke active members of the APA's Theoretical Society about Ontological Hermeneutics in psychotherapy. Each one said that it is a very real theory in therapy. Both the Editor-in-chief and the Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology said the same thing. I downloaded a pdf copy of the article hours before it was ripped off Wikipedia. I sent it to members of the Theoretical Society. They corroborated its veracity (minus a few quibbles: e.g., Lysaker's work on dialogue, though relevant to the dialogism of ontological hermeneutics, is not actually O.H.; and that that should've been clarified and, not all view O.H. as relational. So that schism should've been addressed). But other than those, they said the facts were all there. So, the page I wrote was right. You and I did the Wikipedia community a disservice. Very sad. Then I found the TEDx talk "Astroturf and Manipulation of Media Messages" by Sharyl Attkinson. The relevent portion starts at 3:58 of the video. Urstadt (talk) 22:36, 15 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Let me point out that I had nothing to do with deleting the article. I was just starting to review it, and then it disappeared. Above you said that the article was "ripped off" Wikipedia as if it happened against your will, but it appears that you requested the deletion of the article (this is verifiable by any administrator, who can view the history of the deleted article). And off-wiki conversations are not verifiable. Biogeographist (talk) 13:00, 17 September 2018 (UTC)
 * And let me point out that on the same day that the article was deleted, you called the article "fake". You either lied that the article was "fake" or you lied that the article "was right"—either way, you are not credible. So I find it bizarre that months after you proclaimed on my talk page that you were "done talking with me", you have rambled again about the article's deletion on my talk page when you were the one who called the article "fake" and requested the article's deletion, not me. Very strange. Biogeographist (talk) 13:27, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments
Thanks for your comments here

As a quick note; I agreed with your comments re "Delete being confusing" and altered the RfC accordingly. I deleted that part of your comment as obviously it no longer applies. If you'd prefer I hadn't edited your comment, let me know and I'll revert. Thanks again. NickCT (talk) 16:35, 28 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your note. Per WP:TPOC the comments of other editors should not not be edited except in specific listed situations, but since I don't object and you were courteous enough to leave a note here, it's OK. The heading you wrote is in title case but should be in sentence case like all other headings, per MOS:HEAD. Since you changed the heading, you may want to update the link to the heading at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Psychology‎, which is where I learned of it. Biogeographist (talk) 18:00, 28 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Done and done. And kudos to you for being detail orientated. NickCT (talk) 18:13, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

Thanks re WP:RELATED
I edited WP:RELATED a little hastily. I then tried to undo but I'm fairly new on the platform so you got there first. The redirect actually wasn't working for me but seems to be now. Cheers.

Quietconcerned8 (talk) 14:28, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!
Thanks! I can imagine someone coming along and stripping out the whole section as excessive, which may be a legitimate POV, but for now I think it's helpful to have the section in there (versus in the talk page, where it would be less visible) as an indicator of how much better the article could be if someone would revise and expand it based on some of these sources. Biogeographist (talk) 19:51, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
 * They surely couldn't legitimately delete the section. No way, not unless fulfilling the purpose of the "further reading" and "external links" sections, which is to convert them into inline citations. — Smuckola(talk) 18:09, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

Design thinking POV
Hello, There have been a lot of constructive edits since the POV tag was added by Qzekrom. The current version is much improved (I think!). It has a better structure of two main sections, differentiating more clearly between DT as meaning 'understanding how designers think and work' and DT as 'business/social innovation process' (which is the variety criticised by some), and both sections are now quite neutral in tone. I think the POV tag should be removed now, and I'd like to ask you to propose that to Qzekrom, or just to remove it yourself. (It would be better if you do it, rather than me, since I am now much more identified with the article content through my recent edits.) Many thanks for your involvement in this. Nigel Cross (talk) 11:59, 26 November 2018 (UTC)

SPA edits of Decision-making
Please see my comments at Talk:Decision-making/Archives/2018. You may be able to provide some insight about that. —BarrelProof (talk) 21:52, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Edits of Person-centered therapy
I wanted your help in correcting the mistakes in the information I added to the page of Person-Centered Therapy. Can you tell me what was the problem? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Alon1samuel (talk • contribs) 00:44, 4 January 2019 (UTC)
 * See response at . Biogeographist (talk) 15:34, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

Logical quotation
Thanks for pointing this out, I think what happened is that I was changing things using the mass find/replace function in the visual editor, and I must have flipped the "find" and "replace" boxes by mistake. Cheers Jondr21 (talk) 02:12, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

Article submission enquiry
Hello, I have collaborated with others to create an article titled Cometan which is currently sitting in my sandbox although I'm not sure if it is ready to be published or not. Would you please be able to take a look at the article and let me know if you believe it is written correctly for Wikipedia's regulation and whether you think it will pass scrutiny to get published? If the answer is no, then please could you provide me with some tips of how to improve the article? Thank you. The article is as follows - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TIOTPOM/sandbox TIOTPOM (talk) 07:36, 10 May 2019 (UTC)
 * I think you should follow the Articles for Creation process, so that you receive more feedback from other editors. You can submit your draft article for review at Articles for Creation by adding the code  to the top of User:TIOTPOM/sandbox. If you have any connection to the subject of the article, you should disclose that connection on the talk page at User talk:TIOTPOM/sandbox. Biogeographist (talk) 12:13, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

Comparison of documentation generators
Greetings, I'm the user who's edits you removed from the Comparison of documentation generators page recently, not sure how to contact you otherwise. While I understand the reasoning for the removal, it may have been better to convert (or ask me to convert) the dead links into non-links. The reason is that the tool I added (which was there until 2017, mind you), is one of the most versatile, powerful and longest-available tools in the field. If you edit this page, surely you must be knowledgeable in the field of source code documentation and therefore know Doc-O-Matic. Removing the mention of this tool effectively deprives people interested in the topic of valuable information. I have done as you recommended and added a Doc-O-Matic page Draft:Doc-O-Matic it is waiting for review, maybe you want to take a look. Witoga| —Preceding undated comment added 14:37, 30 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Software lists tend to attract spam; that is why most of them require that each item on the list must have its own article (no red links). This accords with Wikipedia policies such as WP:NOTLINKFARM and WP:NOTDIRECTORY. Your draft article Draft:Doc-O-Matic needs more independent reliable sources to establish notability; a link to the company's website is not sufficient. You may also want to add Template:Infobox software. I have never heard of Doc-O-Matic. Biogeographist (talk) 12:08, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * I've added the info box, but if you take look at the pages of the other tools in the list, I don't know what else to add. No offense but the fact that you have never heard of Doc-O-Matic does not make you the best person to judge, does it. I mean, it's almost 20 years old and still actively maintained and you never heard of it, how is that possible? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Witoga (talk • contribs) 13:48, 31 May 2019(UTC)
 * No offense taken. Of course, I've heard of Doc-O-Matic in relation to the edits of this Wikipedia page, but not otherwise. How is that possible? Perhaps because Doc-O-Matic is software for Microsoft Windows, and I don't use Windows. The fact that you are a user (or creator?) of Doc-O-Matic does not make you the best person to judge its notability, rather the opposite: everyone thinks that their own product is the center of the universe. It is possible that some of the other articles in the list should be deleted for lack of notability as well. Comparing your article to those articles does not help your case. If you notice any articles on other non-notable software, please nominate them for deletion. Thanks, Biogeographist (talk) 18:32, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Following your logic, any page written on WikiPedia about software (or maybe more), should ideally be written by people best oblivious of the topic, otherwise they might be biased. I've properly disclosed my relationship as a user, that's all that's required and your insinuation is a typical deflection and unprofessional. I'm certainly not going to get other tools "expelled". If the goal of a page is a comparison list of a specific type of thing, it makes sense to add any such thing to the list, so long as it's that thing you're comparing. If you apply some filter rules upon a portion of the potential the things you're comparing, while not applying the same filter to the others, the list becomes incomplete and inconsistent. Doc-O-Matic should be up there, it has notability simply by existing so long, and you are not doing a good job maintaining the page by deleting it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Witoga (talk • contribs) 07:39, 1 June 2019(UTC)


 * I don't know what you think I "insinuated" and "deflected"; if you think I was insinuating that you are the creator of Doc-O-Matic, then you are mistaken: I was merely stating the question (because, of course, you could be the creator; how would I know?), which you could answer negatively simply by stating that you're not the creator, or you could choose not to answer. There is no insinuation. See also WP:SPA (which applies to you since you are a SPA): "New editors have the right to be treated with respect and civility; but they should also be aware that, while courtesy and a warm greeting will usually be extended, they may be subject to more scrutiny in the early stages of their editing as other editors attempt to assess how well they adhere to Wikipedia standards." (By the way, welcome to Wikipedia!) There is nothing "unprofessional" in what I have written, and the logic is not mine but comes from the Wikipedia guidelines and policies that I have been citing. The inclusion criteria for Wikipedia lists are developed on a per-list basis, and right now Comparison of documentation generators only includes software that has a Wikipedia article. It's that simple. "Notability" has a special meaning on Wikipedia, and "simply by existing so long" is not what it means; please read the relevant guidelines, e.g., WP:Notability and WP:Notability (organizations and companies). And please sign all your talk page comments with four tildes . Also, you don't need to ping me with Template:Reply to (although you can if you want); since this is my user page, I am automatically notified when you comment. Biogeographist (talk) 14:41, 1 June 2019 (UTC)


 * You insinuated because even though I disclosed my connection upfront, it apparently wasn't enough for you. So you stated an innocent question. I might be the creator, I might not be. Who knows? Right? By the same logic I can question your motives. You might be paid by a commercial entity to remove all mention of the competition. Or not. Who knows, you haven't disclosed anything. Right? NO. Wrong. I'm not going to continue this fun game with you. Even though I made you aware of an application that you did not previously know, you still think that it does not exist in the same way the other tools on the list do. Therefore it's not notable. Nothing I can or will do to change that. You did nothing to help and everything to discourage. You won, congratulations. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Witoga (talk • contribs) 15:35, 1 June 2019(UTC)


 * No, I didn't "win", and this is not about "winning". Let's be clear: I didn't participate in the deletion of the Doc-O-Matic article, and I have no interest in deleting it: in fact, I am the one who helpfully told you to create an article on Doc-O-Matic in my edit summary. That's what WP:WTAF means. I also helpfully told you to add more more independent reliable sources to your draft article on Doc-O-Matic to establish notability and to prevent its creation from being declined. So if I am "paid by a commercial entity to remove all mention of the competition" such as Doc-O-Matic, I'm doing an incredibly incompetent job by advising you to create an article on Doc-O-Matic and then advising you on how to improve that article! Your behavior as an SPA is consistent with someone who could be trying to promote a product (which is not a statement about you personally, but about all such SPAs); in contrast, my behavior is not consistent with someone who is trying "to remove all mention of the competition" of a product. I am just explaining to you how Wikipedia works, and it should be "fun" but not a "fun game" in the pejorative sense that you seem to have used. Biogeographist (talk) 18:08, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

A couple related articles
Thanks for your assist on Library classification.

I also did some work on automatic taxonomy construction and taxonomy (general), and would be grateful if you would look those over for clarity, consistency, and accuracy. These articles are so jargonized, that I'm concerned they may come across as gobbledygook to lay persons. I've tried to reduce any dizziness they might cause unsuspecting readers. :)

Sincerely,  &mdash; The Transhumanist   14:58, 19 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Your edits to taxonomy (general) look fine to me. No doubt the article could use much improvement, but I don't have a vision of what an ideal article would be. Unfortunately I don't know enough about automatic taxonomy construction to evaluate that article. I'm very interested in the intersection of ontology (information science) and taxonomy (general), but I still have much to learn. Biogeographist (talk) 15:31, 19 June 2019 (UTC)
 * That's perfect. I'm interested in how well the article automatic taxonomy construction teaches beginners. Did it make your head spin? That is, was it easily comprehensible, or was it confusing? What concepts were like Greek? What questions does the article leave you with? Most likely, those will reveal what answers the article still needs to provide. ;)  &mdash; The Transhumanist   15:41, 19 June 2019 (UTC)
 * I will respond at . Biogeographist (talk) 16:14, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

Mindgenius software draft page
Hello, as you worked on the Mind-mapping template, would you take a look at this draft article for MindGenius?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Mindgenius

Thanks, Naadobea1776 (talk) 21:17, 27 June 2019 (UTC)


 * I'm not familiar with the subject of that article, so I'm afraid I can't be of assistance. I find myself agreeing with the other reviewers of that article: it's very hard to find good enough references about the subject to show notability. If you wrote the article for money, you might have to accept that it's not going to pan out, at least not until the software developers find some way to stand out from the mass of other mind-mapping software. Biogeographist (talk) 18:19, 28 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks, yes, it was a paid effort to improve on their page (also disclosed). I found some other articles about the company and software, but doesn't seem to meet the threshold. I did examine all the other pages on the template for MindMapping and many didn't seem to have even as much, and many were Java-based (not sure why that was a thing, but it is for the template). Thank you for your time and advice. If it's not deemed notable... then it's not, perhaps there will be improvements to the software in the future that help it stand out. Kind regards, Naadobea1776 (talk) 18:26, 2 July 2019 (UTC)
 * I haven't checked the other mind mapping articles, but I don't doubt that you're right that there are articles of questionable notability. Wikipedia in general is not the best website for doing research on software unless it is famous software. Biogeographist (talk) 18:36, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

Coaching
Can you please discuss your reverts e.g. on the discussion page? I imported some chunks from coaching psychology as you mentioned in your edit comments but that was after checking the sources. Coaching psychology has been described in the academic literature as applied positive psychology. There is some good surveys on the coaching landscape including on what other approaches are used by coaches globally and the context of use. Anyway, would be good to get your input on how it should be structured. I think there should be a section on history/origins, approaches and contexts of application (eg. external coaching, internal coach, managers as coach). Notgain (talk) 00:58, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
 * I've responded at . Biogeographist (talk) 03:04, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

Category:Strategic management
How is the Business Model Canvas not Category:Strategic management? Are there any OTHER purposes for the Business Model Canvas? Strategic management is what it is FOR. Pleasantville (talk) 15:22, 16 July 2019 (UTC)
 * To restate the edit summary in different words: An article does not go in a category when it is already in a subcategory, per WP:CAT; Business Model Canvas is in Category:Business models, which is a subcategory of Category:Strategic management. If you think that the latter is the more appropriate category, then remove the former category and replace it with the latter; I see no problem with that. Biogeographist (talk) 03:00, 20 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Makes sense. Thanks.Pleasantville (talk) 19:26, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

I made some changes following your revert and opened a discussion the talk page. I also changed the CBT disambiguation page. My problem is that the article switches between Beck's CBT and other uses of the acronym. Notgain (talk) 05:28, 20 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Good. One could even go further and distinguish between different versions of Beck's model as it changed over time. Biogeographist (talk) 12:55, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

Conspiracy theory
You can (I am not wholly sure how, I am sure others can tell you) how you can link to a news story in the header of an article talk page to mention the fact its been mentioned in a newspaper article.Slatersteven (talk) 18:33, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia as a press source
I just noticed that the Rfc had closed. Well done! Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 13:30, 5 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Thanks for notifying me; I had been watching the RfC but it slipped off my overloaded watchlist so I didn't notice that it had closed. I will add the historical tag to all of the other YEAR pages in that area. Biogeographist (talk) 17:38, 5 November 2019 (UTC)

Google Code-In 2019 is coming - please mentor some documentation tasks!
Hello,

Google Code-In, Google-organized contest in which the Wikimedia Foundation participates, starts in a few weeks. This contest is about taking high school students into the world of opensource. I'm sending you this message because you recently edited a documentation page at the English Wikipedia.

I would like to ask you to take part in Google Code-In as a mentor. That would mean to prepare at least one task (it can be documentation related, or something else - the other categories are Code, Design, Quality Assurance and Outreach) for the participants, and help the student to complete it. Please sign up at the contest page and send us your Google account address to google-code-in-admins@lists.wikimedia.org, so we can invite you in!

From my own experience, Google Code-In can be fun, you can make several new friends, attract new people to your wiki and make them part of your community.

If you have any questions, please let us know at google-code-in-admins@lists.wikimedia.org.

Thank you!

--User:Martin Urbanec (talk) 21:58, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

Archives
I am personally fine with redacting things from archives (also since I just archived them today), not that it's necessary since the discussion is just very normal, but I do sympathize with those who regret using their real names as usernames. Thanks for reaching out to the user. – Thjarkur (talk) 18:08, 22 December 2019 (UTC)

Saving the connections-based learning page from deletion
Hi Biogeographist, I see that you have recommended the CBL page for deletion and I am hoping to keep it alive. I should start by saying thanks for tightening up the page. I believe that you have a good point that more independent sources are needed. I have already made a change to your work where you stated CBL is not mentioned in Krutka and Carano's journal article. It is mentioned and I fleshed out that reference. I will continue to add references from independent sources. I hope that after seeing the added citations, you will remove the nomination for deletion (and even feel comfortable to add links to the CBL page from other pages where it makes sense :) ). Serobinson01 (talk) 20:46, 14 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the note. By the way, I really like that infographic that illustrates the article—nice work. Unfortunately I can't "take back" the deletion nomination and single-handedly save the article, but perhaps other editors will feel that the page passes the notability check. At this point I still think it doesn't pass notability. You've made a valiant effort but it may just be WP:TOOSOON for a Wikipedia article. One other reason why I think this, apart from the notability issue, is (assuming that you are Sean Robinson) the fact that you are the creator of the subject of the article and the creator and primary contributor to the article gives the appearance that you have been trying to use Wikipedia to promote the subject before it has become independently notable, which is congruent with WP:TOOSOON. Certainly your subject is worthy of promotion, but as editors we all work hard to make sure that Wikipedia isn't a place that people are using for self-promotion of their pet projects. We'll see how the deletion discussion goes. Biogeographist (talk) 21:51, 14 January 2020 (UTC)
 * By the way, you are welcome to jump into the deletion discussion and make a case for keeping the article, but you should disclose that you are the creator of CBL. Just edit Articles for deletion/Connections-based learning, add a paragraph that starts with  and explain your reasons and who you are. Biogeographist (talk) 22:02, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice and the kind words about the infographic. I will continue to work on the article demonstrating the notability of the approach and encourage others to do the same. Hopefully we'll get to a place where you would even offer a. I appreciate the nudge, Biogeographist - Sean Robinson Serobinson01 (talk) 14:47, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Adding "meat-eating" in the article on cognitive dissonance
Your opinion is sought here:. Rasnaboy (talk) 05:07, 17 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for asking; I've added to the discussion there. Biogeographist (talk) 14:20, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Citing videos in articles about books
Hi,

Hope you are well, i appreciate you sharing your thought process, i'll be keen to present ideas which might help you think why it might be worthwhile of thinking of a change,

Gratefully --AGTepper (talk) 03:23, 26 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Perhaps I didn't explain the problem well enough on your talk page. Inline citations are used in an article's body text to associate a claim made in the text with a reliable source for that claim; the citation allows other people to quickly determine whether the claim is verifiable, per Wikipedia policy. If you cite a video without citing the exact time in the video that supports the claim made in the text, then other people cannot quickly determine whether the material is verifiable because they have to watch the whole video and carefully listen, which is not a quick process for videos that are more than a few minutes long. For this reason, when you cite a video, use Cite AV media and make sure to fill in the minutes or time parameter showing the exact point in the video that supports the claim.
 * However, in the articles about books where you added videos as inline citations, the videos are not appropriate because they do not appear to support the claims made about the book. Citations that would support the claims made about the book would come from the book itself or from a source that is explicitly citing the book.
 * Also, I hope you understood what I said about original research in my edit summary of . We can't say that a book "came to a similar conclusion" as another book unless we have a source explicitly saying that; without such a source, that claim is original research, which is prohibited in Wikipedia. You can see that in I added an inline citation to a point in the book by McGregor and Doshi that explicitly mentions Start With Why, which prevents the claim of similarity from being original research. Biogeographist (talk) 04:24, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

appreciate it, how did you find this citation - 'Similarly, marketing expert Simon Sinek ... points out that the best brands in the world 'Start with Why.' Understanding why a person or organization operates—understanding identity—builds the highest levels of brand loyalty.'

--AGTepper (talk) 04:41, 26 January 2020 (UTC)


 * I figured that a good place to find evidence for the similarity claim would be in McGregor and Doshi's book. There are various places online where you can search the full text of books. For a recent book like this one, I often try Google Books or Amazon.com's "Look Inside" feature, which you can use to search the full text of a book if you create an Amazon.com account (which is free). I tried searching Google Books for "Sinek" but there were no results, but I knew that the preview in Google Books was limited, so it wasn't searching the whole book. So I logged into Amazon.com and searched the full text of the book there for "Sinek" and found that quotation. The Wikipedia Library/Navbox lists other "research tools and services" that may be helpful. Biogeographist (talk) 04:52, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

haha, you should put the whole quote 'watch his incredible TED talk for more of his insights', which is what i was hoping of our future readers : ) --AGTepper (talk) 05:00, 26 January 2020 (UTC)


 * LOL. I don't think "watch his incredible TED talk" is relevant to that particular claim! Besides, Wikipedia doesn't need to promote Sinek's TED talks—people know where to find videos online if they want to see videos of a person, and Sinek has published many, many videos. Biogeographist (talk) 05:06, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

appreciate your good humour, but i've changed my mind, you are welcome to add more coi tags or delete the uncited verbiage or the videos or the entire article, it's the loss for the rest of the humanity if these ideas go unheard, i've tried my part, it's time to move on : ) --AGTepper (talk) 05:05, 26 January 2020 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by AGTepper (talk • contribs)


 * I didn't add the COI tags. I'm also not in favor of deleting the article. I helped save the Start With Why article from deletion recently, so I'm definitely not preventing Simon Sinek from having a place on Wikipedia! I see you're new to Wikipedia, so you may be discouraged that some of your edits are being reverted, but just understand that it's part of your learning process as a new editor! Your contribution of McGregor and Doshi's work to Start With Why was a helpful addition, it just needed to be tweaked a little to conform with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, which it can take some time to learn. Biogeographist (talk) 05:16, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

haha, people were trying to delete 'start with why', that's the dumbest thing i have heard since those muppets got rid of jobs at apple, my contribution of McGregor and Doshi's work was actually a sneaky way of trying to get McGregor and Doshi's work their own wiki page, but that dream is long gone now, haha on serious note the power of their work far outstrips any other edits i am contributing, you should experience it first hand, and if watching a video is too much, you can hear my sweet voice walking you to the gold mine i have come across --AGTepper (talk) 05:26, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

haha, i just realised why you were stalking 'start with why'; u helped save the article from deletion recently, duh, my blindspot : ) --AGTepper (talk) 05:30, 26 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Yep. In fact, I watched the whole McGregor and Doshi video already to see if it mentioned Start With Why. That's how I knew that it didn't mention Sinek. Then I read a few of McGregor and Doshi's articles. Their work is good, but it mostly supports what I already know—I read a lot of this kind of management psychology, among many other subjects. If their work is the first time you have encountered this kind of stuff, I can understand why you would be impressed. There are a lot of people doing this kind of research, though. Biogeographist (talk) 05:33, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

hmmm, how about this one, you familiar with this - https://www.principles.com/principles-for-success/ --AGTepper (talk) 05:41, 26 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Of course. I've read the book. How could I have avoided the mega hype around Principles?

you are officially the first such person i know with 2 out of 2, here's the final one, our dear friend Sinek is back again with this one - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReRcHdeUG9Y --AGTepper (talk) 05:57, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Template talk:Press
If you're interested, we discussed it a little in October. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:21, 26 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks; I responded there. Biogeographist (talk) 14:37, 27 January 2020 (UTC)
 * That's a lot of text now for something we don't even disagree on ;-) Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:04, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

Your GA nomination of Effective altruism
Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article Effective altruism you nominated for GA-status according to the criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of J Milburn -- J Milburn (talk) 19:01, 27 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Excellent news, ! I hope you will agree that your time and effort on this GA review is well spent! Biogeographist (talk) 21:17, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

Lean startup edits
Hi, can you explain the rationale behind your edits. They only seem to have made the article worse? Johnny &#34;ThunderPeel2001&#34; Walker (talk) 10:47, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I responded at . Biogeographist (talk) 14:33, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

Your GA nomination of Effective altruism
The article Effective altruism you nominated as a good article has failed ; see Talk:Effective altruism for reasons why the nomination failed. If or when these points have been taken care of, you may apply for a new nomination of the article. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of J Milburn -- J Milburn (talk) 17:42, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

"World Café" listed at Redirects for discussion
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect World Café. Since you had some involvement with the World Café redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. wbm1058 (talk) 15:02, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Gaslighting reference
A more appropriate action on your part would have been to simply add a "Citation Needed" tag, and I would have obliged! — Preceding unsigned comment added by DeeJaye6 (talk • contribs) 02:51, 10 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Per Wikipedia's core content policy of verifiability, "Any material that needs a source but does not have one may be removed." My action was 100% appropriate. I only use Citation needed for material that I am reasonably sure belongs in the article but is unsourced, not for material that I have never heard of before. And there are also issues relevant to your edit discussed at WP:IPCV. Biogeographist (talk) 11:43, 10 April 2020 (UTC)

AEDP article
Hi Biogeographist. I put @ before your name in the talk section of the accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy draft, but I'm not sure if that actually sends you a notification. I hope its ok that I contact you directly on your page. I have massively re-written the AEDP article - taking out technical language and adding critique section. The article was rejected on April 27 primarily for not Neutral point of view, and not encyclopedic and including original research. I re-wrote taking out the primary references, and I didn't pick and chose references according to what was complimentary, in fact I used every reference that there is. I wonder if you wouldn't mind, once again, having a look and perhaps you can vouch for the article if you believe it is worthy of inclusion in wikipedia. thank-you for time. Carrie Carrieruggieri (talk) 17:24, 4 May 2020 (UTC)


 * I am generally in favor of covering AEDP in Wikipedia, but I think editors other than me should evaluate the article. I have left a request for other editors at . Biogeographist (talk) 16:08, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

Thank you. I appreciate your sending a request on my behalf. Carrieruggieri (talk) 18:26, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

Falsifiability
Just curious. Do you think that the last edits on the article falsifiability are OK, perhaps even improvements. I would not be so surprise that you have no problem with them, because most of my interactions with you consisted in receiving references for books. I never had a discussion about the content. It was as if you searched well on the Internet for opposing views. For example, I don't remember a discussion showing an appreciation of the details of the definition such as the fact that clearly, falsifiability is all at the level of statements, which is now totally rejected by the recent edits. Still, you were doing such a good job at providing references that I am not sure. So, I am curious to know what is your view on the recent edits. In providing your opinion, you might confirm that I was right when I decided that there was not enough shared understanding to continue editing this article. This would be very much appreciated. Dominic Mayers (talk) 19:33, 26 June 2020 (UTC) (copied from before)


 * No, I don't think the last edits on the article are an improvement; what you wrote above is correct. I agree with the general sentiment of simplifying the lead a little and easing into the concepts, but those recent edits are badly done. I wish you had not nuked your account. Even though you needed more help than you had (I agree that your style of constructing the article was unusual for Wikipedia), and even though we disagreed about what I would now call the scope of the article (but I don't think I was able to communicate exactly what I meant), still, in your own style and within your chosen scope you were adding important information. I agree that there was a lack of shared understanding between you and me, but that should not have been an obstacle since I was not really editing the article, just pointing to literature. Frankly I am a little burned out on the subject right now, and I am not eager to jump in and intervene in the editing, despite my largely negative opinion of the most recent edits. Biogeographist (talk) 01:34, 27 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I was not at all expecting that you will intervene. I am completely detached of the article. It's the past. I care more about you, our interaction than about the article.


 * I also had the feeling that we could made the lead a bit less exact, but I didn't see how. In my opinion it was not that bad. It was not at all hard to understand: "contradicted by a statement with parts that are separately possible". It's written in plain English and it's the only way that it can make sense. A bit of mystery is not bad. Immediately the reader has a direction to investigate. It's way better than a statement that makes no sense.


 * I don't blame you at all for not sharing my understanding, of course not. Yet, definitively a shared understanding was necessary for me to continue to work. That's ok. I understand that you focused on the fact that some books presented a different perspective. You always came with new books with a different perspective than Popper. It was not a negative attitude. You must have felt that it will improve the article and create balance. But a different form of balance was also needed. A balance between the horizontal direction where we add new books and the vertical direction where we understand Popper's model how these different perspectives are harmoniously related, why some claims made in these books do not necessarily have to be included, etc. Dominic Mayers (talk) 19:33, 26 June 2020 (UTC) (copied from before)

Assuming your application to join AFC is successful
I have a list of decline rationales at User:Timtrent/Reviewing that  are often useful, sometimes edited, sometimes more than one at a time. Fiddle  Faddle  17:10, 23 July 2020 (UTC)

Deletions
While reviweing your delete of a valid reference to Monte-Carlo methods I notice that you recently deleted several similar references in other articles.

The references are OK ! The difficulty appears to be the editor-name Edtech which is mis-quoted as ED-Tech.

I submit that you should please restore/revert/correct those other references -- jw (talk) 06:04, 24 July 2020 (UTC)


 * I didn't check every source I removed, but I didn't have to: if it is published by Ed-Tech (Edtech), then it has to go. If you're saying that the reference was incorrect, then that's an equally good reason to remove the reference, in my view. The publisher was approved for removal at . If you want to dispute that decision, present your evidence there. Biogeographist (talk) 11:43, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

Regarding 'Consensus decision-making'
Hi Biogeographist! And thanks for your work on Consensus decision-making, it was feeling lonely. I appreciate your re-formatting, and for linking the formatting policies of which I'm still not familiar. A couple questions: Look forward to hearing from you! Douginamug (talk) 21:34, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I notice you removed the bolding from the section on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: I took this formatting from the Liberum veto article—Should I mirror that formatting there?
 * You added "consensus politics or consensualism" as alternative terms for consensus-decision making, which don't seem quite right to me. 'Consensus politics', because I wouldn't say 'Majority politics' for an article on majority voting; 'consensualism', because I've almost never heard that term used (and some quick searching does not strongly associate it with CDM as a distinct deliberative process, but more of a life philosophy.) Are you confident to keep both terms?


 * (1) The terms in the Liberum veto article should be italicized, both because they are non-English terms per MOS:FOREIGNITALIC and because they are not alternative titles/redirects per MOS:NOBOLD. I just made that change. (2) I added those terms because they both redirect to Consensus decision-making. I didn't look up which articles link to those redirect terms until now, and I see that no articles link to consensualism so that could be removed, which I just did. Consensus politics is linked from several articles, so it should appear somewhere in the article in boldface per WP:R. Wikipedia defines politics as "the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups" (etc.), so consensus politics would seem to be very close in meaning indeed to consensus decision-making. But if you want to try to find some other place in the article to describe consensus politics as something different from consensus decision-making, go ahead. Biogeographist (talk) 22:27, 2 August 2020 (UTC)


 * 1) Thanks for copying those changes over 2) Ah OK, WP:R makes sense. How do I search for the pages which link to a redirect term? For articles, there is what links here, but I have no idea how to do that for e.g. consensus politics. I'll have a think about 'consensus politics'. I get the feeling the term is somehow too broad, but perhaps it's not. In any case, I'm not desperate to change it right now. Cheers! Douginamug (talk) 20:49, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

Here are three ways to see what links to Consensus politics, listed from simplest to most complicated: That's how to have fun looking up links to redirects. If you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong. Biogeographist (talk) 14:34, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
 * 1) Go to Special:WhatLinksHere/Consensus politics. (Any other page title can be inserted after Special:WhatLinksHere.)
 * 2) Go to Consensus politics, which redirects to Consensus decision-making. Under the article title it says "Redirected from Consensus politics". Click on "Consensus politics" in that phrase, which goes to the Consensus politics page without redirecting. Click on "What links here" in the sidebar.
 * 3) Go to Consensus decision-making. Click on "What links here" in the sidebar. Click on "Hide transclusions". Click on "Hide links". Now only pages that redirect to Consensus decision-making are listed. One of those pages is Consensus politics. Click on the "links" link next to it.

Thank you
Thank you for your help with Reading education in the United States. There is so much I don't know. John NH (talk) 15:24, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2020 September 15 § Template:Use shortened footnotes
You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2020 September 15 § Template:Use shortened footnotes. Peaceray (talk) 05:09, 15 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the invitation; I've contributed to the discussion. Biogeographist (talk) 14:17, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

Hypnosis
Hypnosis does involve a trance and sleepy phase. What was described in the Nigerian warfare, was a psychological system of hypnotizing enemies. Kwesi Yema (talk) 18:05, 20 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I responded at . Biogeographist (talk) 20:32, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

Thoughts?
We went back and forth a bit about academic cite spamming. Do you have any thoughts about the requests from this user? I see it more of interest to add their publication as sources into different page than, say build contents and a creative way of adding their own sources through proxy. Graywalls (talk) 03:25, 24 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I responded at . Biogeographist (talk) 15:49, 24 October 2020 (UTC)

Problem of induction
Because you recently edited Problem of induction, I would like to have your opinion about a recent modification. Dominic Mayers (talk) 15:41, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
 * I responded at Talk:Problem of induction. Biogeographist (talk) 19:19, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

EBSCOhost Connection links
Hi Biogeographist – just following up on your request for help fixing broken EBSCOhost Connection links, of which it looks like there are around 2500 in total. I spoke with our contacts at EBSCO and they confirmed that the landing pages these links pointed to have been deprecated entirely – there's no longer any page to redirect the links to. Their reasoning is that the links only led to a library login screen, and had some broken functionality. There's a new tool they're rolling out at the end of the month to help folks log in via their library which may be useful, but doesn't seem to be a direct replacement for the links. Personally I wish there was some kind of publicly visible landing page folks could land on before needing to login, but it is what it is. Hope that's helpful. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 15:41, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks. It's too bad that EBSCO deprecated the pages. That's like JSTOR saying that JSTOR numbers aren't going to work anymore. Should a discussion be started somewhere about creating a bot for removing the EBSCOhost Connection links? Biogeographist (talk) 16:15, 18 November 2020 (UTC)
 * That might be worthwhile, perhaps at WP:VPT. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 09:50, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

Nomination of Superstitions in Muslim societies for deletion
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Superstitions in Muslim societies is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Articles for deletion/Superstitions in Muslim societies until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Bookku (talk) 05:11, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

Happy New Year!




 Biogeographist , Thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia, and a Happy New Year to you and yours! Rasnaboy (talk) 08:52, 31 December 2020 (UTC)


 * – Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year}} to user talk pages.
 * Thanks,, Happy New Year to you too! Biogeographist (talk) 23:12, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

Request for opinion
New year Greetings;

I had opened a discussion @ Village_pump_(policy); one of the answer there I received is fallacy of appeal to popularity won't apply since matter is of tautology.

I thought it would be batter to seek more opinions from those who have edited articles related to List of fallacies and since your edit @ Argument from authority got denoted in related edits. Requesting your opinion if you could form any and feel interested in the topic.

Thanks and warm regards

Bookku (talk) 08:56, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

Speed
In my experience, searching Internet Archive is not slow and is comparable to searching Google. Go to archive.org, in the second search box (not the one that says Wayback), enter "Charles Dickens" and the radio button for "Search text contents" (ie. full-text search inside the books) and the results come back immediately. There are many cool options on the left column not available at Google. -- Green  C  17:21, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Searching within a book, to return a list of all results within a book, in the Internet Archive is slow for me, much slower than Google Books. Drawing book pages is also slower at the Internet Archive. Sometimes the Internet Archive is the only option, when a book can't be searched at Google Books. I love the Internet Archive, but let's not deceive ourselves that it's faster at this point in time! Biogeographist (talk) 19:34, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Ah, within a book is slower yes. However, every page that contains the match item is linked. At Google, it only displays certain pages that are available for preview, thus it has fewer pages to search. I would think a full search of the book is more important than a fast search of an abridged version of the book. -- Green  C  20:39, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
 * One would think so, yes, and it's true for books that aren't fully accessible in Google Books. But even so, on bad days when the Internet Archive speed is really lagging, I get a little impatient! Biogeographist (talk) 22:37, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Legal coaching
Hi Biogeographist - I realized your removal of my last edition on the subject of "Legal Coaching" - you are absolutely correct, that many of the cites are from my sources. Regarding to the top of the article to add more referrals, I tried my very best. But because the subject "Legal Coaching" is quite new and I'm an expert on this field since I teach "Legal Coaching" in German Universities (starting 2016) there are not really other sources. Let's do this together and show me, how we can contribute and add this very new subject to the coaching article. What are your suggestions? Best regards, Geertje --Geertje Tutschka (talk) 08:51, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
 * You seem to have a lot to say about the topic of legal coaching. If you think the topic meets Wikipedia's general notability guideline, then I would recommend starting a new article at Articles for creation. Go to Articles for creation, read the page, and then click on the button "Click here to start a new article". If the article is accepted, then we can add a summary section and link to the new article in Coaching. If the article is rejected for lack of notability, then it is questionable whether there should be a summary section in Coaching either. Topics need to meet Wikipedia's criteria of notability to be included. That is my recommendation.
 * By the way, keep in mind that headings in English Wikipedia are sentence case, not title case (see MOS:HEADCAPS), so a heading about legal coaching would say "Legal coaching" not "Legal Coaching". Biogeographist (talk) 13:21, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
 * @biogeographist: Thank you so much - I very appreciate your advice. Especially the links on cites were very helpful. So I drafted a new article "Legal coaching" and applied the newest sources. Because I'm very close to the topic (that's why I'm writing under my real name from the beginning) I was wondering, if you could edit and add something to the article draft before I submit it for approval (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Legal_coaching). And please don't hesitate to invite other Wiki´s at well. I'm very thrilled to add the subject of Legal Coaching to the Coaching Topic at WIKI. Let the journey begin :-)--Geertje Tutschka (talk) 16:16, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks a lot - I worked in it again and think it's now ready for submit - what do you think? --Geertje Tutschka (talk) 15:51, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
 * I responded at . Biogeographist (talk) 18:37, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks - I will working on it again.Geertje Tutschka (talk) 08:40, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Informative
Hi, glad to see we agree citations should informative. I'm only a few months old so I don't expect to be taken seriously, but I certainly don't like vandalism of citations when I see it, so I'll support action if the chance comes up. The user in question has become quite bold towards me. Invasive Spices (talk) 19:39, 9 June 2021 (UTC)
 * The citation mutilation is a dark stain on this encyclopedia. Biogeographist (talk) 00:39, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

Direct/primary issues versus indirect/inferred issues in Empirical evidence
I am not sure, but it seems that your direct or primary concern in the article Empirical evidence is that it should cover well how epistemology applies to the subject. I say that because the relation between epistemology and philosophy of science appears in many of your arguments. In particular, it appears in your recent edit, which was done after few days of silence. If my understanding is not too wrong, you see or saw an article that focuses on Empirical evidence in philosophy of science as a content fork, because it seems a way to avoid to cover the application of epistemology. It's not. In fact, you can see it the opposite way: it will allow to cover this aspect in a more focused manner in the other article. Moreover, the article with a focus in philosophy of science should still mention this aspect that concerns you. It's not a content fork, but an ordinary global organization under two articles. Dominic Mayers (talk) 21:23, 5 July 2021 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your thoughts, and I am not concerned about our supererogatory rules on user talk pages, so don't worry about not respecting your own rule! You deleted much of what you said here, I think to try to be succinct, but I think it may be valuable if I address some of what you deleted. But we shouldn't have a long discussion here since the main discussion should stay on the article talk page(s). I am only responding to try to clarify for you how I am thinking.


 * I am not sure, but it seems that your direct or primary concern in the article Empirical evidence is that it should cover well how epistemology applies to the subject. This may be concern, but it is not  personal concern. Like Barry Allen, I am really not very interested in traditional epistemology. I mentioned Allen in the discussion as a way of pointing to someone who explicitly says that epistemology is not important. When I read the sources on epistemology that the Wikipedia article cites, I felt like: "Please, kill me now!" Mario Bunge is an example of someone who I think makes epistemology palatable, but only by radically changing it. However (unfortunately?), someone cited all those epistemology-oriented tertiary sources in the Wikipedia article, and I don't see a strong case for completely removing them, especially since, as I noted in the main discussion, the uses of the term "empirical evidence" in the sciences overlap with the uses in epistemology. But personally I would prefer to cut much of that crap stuff.


 * I say that because the relation between epistemology and philosophy of science appears in many of your arguments. Yes, the relation between epistemology and philosophy of science appears in what I said, since I noticed that epistemology and philosophy of science are presented as a duality in the current article: "In epistemology, is [A]. In philosophy of science, on the other hand,  is [B]." This echoes what is said in the IEP article on "Evidence", for example. My own preference is to try to find a different way of framing the subject otherwise than this duality, but currently I don't have very good sources, so my preference may be WP:OR.


 * If my understanding is not too wrong, you see or saw an article that focuses on Empirical evidence in philosophy of science as a content fork, because it seems a way to avoid to cover the application of epistemology. It's not. In fact, you can see it the opposite way: it will allow to cover this aspect in a more focused manner in the other article. I understand your "It's not a content fork or POV fork" position. However, I am not convinced for reasons I mentioned in the discussion. Furthermore, given what I said above about epistemology, you can see why the prospect of covering epistemology in a more focused manner in the other article is not, for me, an attractive argument in favor of two articles.


 * I too have my own direct or primary concern: I want to avoid a content fork in which the two articles on Empirical evidence push the view of science as a justification of theories as if it was now the best accepted view. I figured this out from what you already wrote, but what is not clear to me is how extreme your rejection of "justification" is; Popperians vary on this point. I expect that we would agree that it is wrong to push the view that scientific evidence establishes certain/indubitable theories: all fallibilists, which I think would include most mainstream philosophers and scientists, would agree that scientific evidence does not establish such certainty/indubitability, and if "justification" is equivalent to that, then scientific evidence has nothing to do with justification. But there is an ordinary fallibilist sense in which "a justification" is equivalent to "a rationale", which in relation to a theory is just a set of reasons for using the theory; in science the principal reasons for using a theory may be that relevant hypotheses have been subjected to severe tests and have held up better than the plausible rival hypotheses, and these reasons can be said to comprise a kind of (fallible) justification; to claim that no such justification is possible is not scientific but irrationalist, in my view. So it has to be clarified that there are good and bad ways of defining "justification"; the good ways are about testing, and the bad ways are about establishing certainty/indubitability. That is how I see it, but I wonder if you have a more extreme view.


 * At the start of the discussion, I incorrectly assumed that having two articles was a way to create this content fork. Now, I see that the content fork can exist in both ways: with one or two articles. The number of articles is not directly related to this content fork. No, here I think you are mistaken about the definition of "content fork" and "POV fork"; these terms only apply to how a subject is treated between two (or more) articles.


 * after we have clarified the scope of both articles and how they are each organized. This task, especially how each article is organized, is in fact the biggest challenge and it must be addressed first. I claim that our discussion regarding names, disambiguation or merger was kind of lacking a foundation, because this question was not first addressed. I agree that earlier in the discussion a foundation was lacking, but I think that the foundation that was lacking was the consideration, through discussion, of a variety of issues. Given the current state of the discussion, I think a good next step would be to discuss the organization of each article, but it may be easiest to do this in draft articles with associated talk pages. Then we would have an object (the draft article) to manipulate directly.


 * In one perspective, Wikipedia editors cannot be trusted to do a synthesis of articles in controversial subjects and, therefore, the scope and the global organization of an article (in these topics) must be determined by following what is done in one (or two) sources. The argument in favour of this perspective says that Wikipedia editors cannot claim to do better than those experts that have written these one or two sources. I am totally opposed to this perspective. I think you may have misunderstood what I was trying to do with the two books on scientific evidence. I was only brainstorming very general ways to organize the "in science" article under headings, and I was suggesting that the section headings of those two books gave some very good ideas. I was not suggesting that the content of the article should be limited to the content of those books. So the perspective that you have described in this passage is not mine, and nobody else has expressed this perspective either. But I also said (as a separate issue) that the titles of those books referred to "scientific evidence" not "empirical evidence", which led to my conclusion that the title of Scientific evidence is fine. I take it that you still disagree, but if you have more to say about that, then I think it should go in the article talk page, since here we should only clear up any misunderstandings.


 * I don't see at all how we can avoid a bias by picking one or two sources. It seems to do exactly the opposite, especially in controversial topics, even if the sources claim to do themselves a synthesis. It fails to take advantage of the unique wiki situation offered by Wikipedia to address the issue. Again, regarding the structure and content of the "in science" article, I only presented those books as sources of some good general ideas about organization, not to dictate all the details nor strict conformity; indeed the structures and content of the two books are very different (conflicting), so it would be impossible to conform to them exactly. They are a possible starting point.


 * don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The baby is the required discussions and the related synthesis of many sources. Yes, I agree there is no substitute for critical discussion. However, I am a little dismayed by how time-consuming it is. Biogeographist (talk) 01:25, 6 July 2021 (UTC)

Dominic Mayers's reply
I think it's fine that we do some of the discussion here and only write the essential in the article's talk page. BTW, it will have been good that we keep the one point at a time rule here. There is no time saved in proceeding in parallel over many points. On the contrary, if we take care of a first point, it might help to better cover the others. Nevertheless, because you might expect a response to all points, I will respond point by point, identifying each point with the excerpt from me that you selected.

Dominic Mayers (talk) 05:51, 6 July 2021 (UTC)
 * I am not sure, but it seems that your direct or primary concern in the article Empirical evidence is that it oitshould cover well how epistemology applies to the subject.
 * I might not have understood what is the issue with regard to epistemology, but I don't think it changes the main point. Also, it's not because I say it is your concern that I mean that it is personal to you. I also have my own concern with regard to justification in science and it's not personal to me either.
 * I say that because the relation between epistemology and philosophy of science appears in many of your arguments.
 * Without having looked at the details, only on general principles, somehow in support to what you wrote, if really epistemology and philosophy of science present unrelated, possibly opposite, views on empirical evidence, then it's weird. It would mean that there is a kind of "content fork" in the literature itself: The two fields would be like two articles used to present different views without properly relating them.
 * If my understanding is not too wrong, you see ... a content fork ... It's not. In fact, you can see it the opposite way: it will allow to cover this aspect in a more focused manner in the other article.
 * You never replied to my counter argument against the reasons that you have to worry about a content fork. If a split is not used to hide an opposition between different views on the object of study, it's not what we call a content fork. It's easy to avoid the content fork: we simply do not hide the opposition. You need to be way more explicit about the content fork that you worry about, because I really think it does not have to exist, even with two articles. We do not want to give undue weight to that opposition either.
 * I too have my own direct or primary concern: I want to avoid a content fork in which the two articles on Empirical evidence push the view of science as a justification of theories as if it was now the best accepted view.
 * I only mean what is meant by the Quine-Duhem thesis, the confirmation holism view and Hume's no-induction argument. Popper did not invent any of these well known views. He only argued while accepting these views that there was still room for rationality in science, but he was misunderstood and still is by many. For me, the key ingredient to understand Popper is to accept that the irrational process of science can make use of deductive logic, statistics, etc. This is what is difficult to accept: how something irrational can make use of something rational? The problem is that the word "irrational" seems to mean something stupid that follows no laws. Of course, if we adopt this strong definition of "irrational", then it makes no sense to say that science is an irrational process that makes use of deductive logic, statistics, etc. But "irrational" in this context does not mean that it follows no laws. It only mean that we have not written down what are these laws (and perhaps we will never succeed to write them down). For example, when Einstein wrote that there there is no logical path toward the theories of science, he did not meant to say that the brain of the scientists who discover these theories follow no laws. So, my position, which is also Popper's position, is that, if we want to speak of evidence in a rational process, it has to be in the context of a deeper law that was itself obtained "irrationally", but not in a stupid manner.  Of course, once we accept some context, as we always do when we use statistics, we can speak of evidence in a rational manner.
 * At the start of the discussion, I incorrectly assumed that having two articles was a way to create this content fork. Now, I see that the content fork can exist in both ways: with one or two articles. The number of articles is not directly related to this content fork.
 * I made a mistake here, but you would not see it as a big one, if you understood the concept of content fork the way I understand it. Fundamentally, a content fork is when you try to hide that a point of view is opposed to another. Formally, it occurs when one point of view is moved into a different article, but the equivalent of a content fork can occur within a single article. They don't call it a content fork, but it is mentioned that moving a point of view in some controversy section at the end is not recommended if it will fit well within the core of the article. Conversely, if you move the content into another article, but keep enough of it in the original article to make a link that clearly brings out the opposition between the two points of view it is not a content fork. Otherwise, a content fork would be no big deal: why should it matter that we present a given set of contents (with the same link between them) in one or two articles? What's the difference between a link created, say,  by juxtaposition of two sections into a single article and a link explicitly created between two sections in different articles? Why should it be such a big deal? On the contrary, an explicit link between two articles can be more apparent than an implicit link created by two sections existing in a same article.  I am not saying that having two articles makes no difference. It makes a big difference, because it allows a second entry point, which can be very useful.  I am saying, however, that, if the goal is not to hide an opposition, but to provide a different entry point, the split can usually be done in a way that avoid a content fork.
 * Also, as result of a split the moved content might have less weight, but this should not be confused with a content fork. On the contrary, it might be the desired effect. It's one of the valid reason to do a split: if it is determined that a content has too much weight when we keep it in the article, it's fine to remove it and the content can then go into a different article. This is not content fork. In some cases, it may be decided by the editors that a point of view should have no weight at all in the article. For example, Creationism could be discussed in Evolution and at some moment the editors might decide that the former should have no weight at all in the latter. In this case, the point of view is suppressed entirely from the article and moved into a different article and it's not a content fork: a content fork assumes that the point of view that is moved out should have some weight in the article.
 * after we have clarified the scope of both articles and how they are each organized. ... our discussion regarding names, disambiguation or merger was kind of lacking a foundation, because this question was not first addressed.
 * Well, as far as I am concerned the main issue that was clarified by the long discussions regarding names, merger, etc. is that we needed to better understand what had to be named, merged, etc. If you use drafts, it would be best for me if they were kept to the strict minimum needed to explain the scope and the organization of each article, which is really the essential.
 * In one perspective, Wikipedia editors cannot be trusted to do a synthesis of articles in controversial subjects and, therefore, the scope and the global organization of an article (in these topics) must be determined by following what is done in one (or two) sources. ... I am totally opposed to this perspective.
 * I don't see at all how we can avoid a bias by picking one or two sources. ... It fails to take advantage of the unique wiki situation offered by Wikipedia to address the issue.
 * Yes, you are right that no one expressed this perspective in this discussion, but I have seen it often at other occasions. The fact that these two books uses "Scientific evidence" is one aspect that needs to be  balanced by a consideration of other sources that can be obtained by other search criteria applicable to the topic.
 * don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The baby is the required discussions and the related synthesis of many sources.
 * Yes, the discussion could be more efficient. I suggest that we try the idea of covering one point at a time. It could happen that some points that were raised in parallel, would not have appeared or would have been easier to address in the light of previously addressed points. I made an exception here, but it was extremely time consuming. It might have been done more efficiently had we covered one point at a time.  Please feel free to reply to one point only. The one that you feel is the most important that we clarify. I will bring the other points again, one at a time as needed, if I feel it's needed. You can also bring them later as needed, if you feel it's needed. I think this approach can only make the discussion more efficient.

Biogeographist's reply
Here are a few responses to what jumps out at me:

If a split is not used to hide an opposition between different views on the object of study, it's not what we call a content fork. No, per WP:CFORK, "A content fork is the creation of multiple separate articles all treating the same subject." Is Empirical evidence versus Scientific evidence already a content fork? It may be. At the moment I don't remember exactly what was said about this at Talk:Scientific evidence. If I remember correctly, I said that I don't oppose a merge of Scientific evidence into Empirical evidence, and Phlsph7 said that there was still the problem of "scientific evidence that is not empirical", but also said that if there must be a merger, it should be a merger of Scientific evidence into Empirical evidence, but Phlsph7 thought that more editing of the articles should be done before that merger is considered.

But "irrational" in this context does not mean that it follows no laws. It only mean that we have not written down what are these laws (and perhaps we will never succeed to write them down). ... So, my position, which is also Popper's position, is that, if we want to speak of evidence in a rational process, it has to be in the context of a deeper law that was itself obtained "irrationally", but not in a stupid manner. Of course, once we accept some context, as we always do when we use statistics, we can speak of evidence in a rational manner. I doubt that "laws" is the right word here; I would replace it with "patterns of cognition of scientists". Psychologists and cognitive scientists of science have already "written down" many of these patterns of cognition of scientists. Substituting "patterns of cognition of scientists" for "laws", and "developed" for "obtained", one of your statements becomes: "if we want to speak of evidence in a rational process, it has to be in the context of deeper patterns of cognition of scientists that were themselves developed 'irrationally', but not in a stupid manner." Here it is important to clarify whether "developed" refers to the deep history of science (like phylogeny) or only to one generation of scientists (like ontogeny); different sets of processes are operative at different timescales. Within one generation, it is relevant that psychological research suggests that even young children are rational to a considerable degree, long before some of them become scientists, and "metacognitive awareness, knowledge, and control of inferential processes" continue developing over a person's lifetime. By "irrationalism" I meant the view, which I find very unrealistic, that scientists can and should do science without any rationale (in other words, without any justification) for theories or for other artifacts. Popperian polemics against "justification" often sound very much like this view. But if even young children are rational to a considerable degree, then certainly scientists, who have highly developed "metacognitive awareness, knowledge, and control of inferential processes", are concerned about their rationale or justification for their use of theories and other artifacts. Biogeographist (talk) 18:42, 6 July 2021 (UTC)

Dominic Mayers's reply II
I will essentially reply to your second point only. In the first point you simply ignored my point about POV fork. "Content fork" is the generic term used to describe a process that is not necessarily a problem. If we use it to express a problem, it essentially mean "POV fork" or some useless redundancy, which is less problematic. It's obvious in the context that I referred to "POV fork", the most problematic issue that concerns us with regard to content fork. In your first point, you also refer to what was mentioned in the past, but I cannot see the link at all with POV fork. So, though you quoted me about POV fork, you have not replied at all to what I said about it. I have tried many times to discuss what is POV fork with you to explain that the split in two articles is not a POV fork, some times I used the exact expression "POV fork". I never had a satisfactory reply.

Regarding the second point, I don't think I used incorrectly "law". This is another example where we must use the context. The context where a term is used is very important. In this case, had I used "pattern" as you suggest, I would have expected that you refer to the context to understand that it meant "law" as in "law of nature". A fruitful discussion requires some common background knowledge. In this case, the concept of "laws of nature" is important and I tried to refer to it without success. This concept (even though there is no agreement about a few points) is a common background knowledge that is shared by almost all philosophers of science. We discover the laws of nature as equations and formula, but we all believe that these laws were respected even before they were discovered. Moreover, we keep finding new and better equations and formula and, in that sense, we don't know what the true laws of nature are and we might never succeed to write them down—we might always find better equations. You basically counter argued that Psychologists and cognitive scientists of science have already "written down" many of these patterns of cognition of scientists. But, these are not the laws of nature and, as pointed out below, not even ways to discover them. This shows that you did not follow me at all with my reference to a well accepted background knowledge. You even changed the terminology that I used to justify this misunderstanding. Please read again and try again to respond to what I actually wrote (and use the context to interpret correctly the words I use). I mention a key point to help you. I do not argue at all in my comment for the fact that science is an irrational process. This claimed irrationality is nothing more than a reference to the Quine-Duhem thesis, the confirmation holism view and Hume's no induction argument. I do think that whenever Popper, Einstein and many other great scientists or philosophers speak of the irrational process of science, they do refer to the same irrationality that is shown by these fundamental theses and arguments. My comment tries only to bridge the gap between these strong arguments for the irrationality of science and the common experience that science is successful in making use of logic, statistics, etc. The purpose of the argument is to explain how an irrational process can do that. The answer is simply that "irrational" does not mean that it does not follow the laws of nature. Again, let me emphasis how you missed the point: you counter argued that actually science is rational because psychologists and cognitive scientists of science have already "written down" many of these patterns of cognition of scientists. These do not explain how science works, because there are no general rules to determine when a particular pattern applies. It is similar to statistical laws: each time we must decide whether a given statistical law applies or not. Otherwise, the problem of induction and all the arguments for the irrationality of science would have been defeated. I am not saying that we should not mention the different view points here, but presenting them as opposite views would be very naive. There are sources that do a better job at conciliating these views. This is the same basic point that I mentioned in our discussion at Falsifiability: we must avoid presenting superficial oppositions, because it's not useful for the readers. Dominic Mayers (talk) 21:42, 6 July 2021 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the reply. We are using the term "content fork" differently. WP:CFORK says, under "Acceptable types of forking": "There are things that occur from time to time that may be mistaken for content forking. Note that meeting one of the descriptions listed here does not preclude something from also being a content fork." Here "content fork" seems to refer to an unacceptable type of forking, which is how I generally use the term. You are using the term to refer to both acceptable and unacceptable forking. I apologize that I didn't notice before that we were using the term differently. Otherwise, I already gave my view about the "POV fork" issue; my view is that we can't know whether it is a POV fork until more work is done on the content.


 * Regarding laws, I knew how the term is generally used, and that knowledge was the basis for what I said. Briefly, my understanding, which I think is in line with how the term "laws" is generally used in science, is that they refer to constraints. Science, scientific cognition, and knowledge in general, are about more than documenting constraints; they are also about exploring and documenting what happens within those constraints and why, where "why" includes modes of explanation beyond establishing laws: for example, mechanismic explanations. You said: These do not explain how science works, because there are no general rules to determine when a particular pattern applies. This seems to presume that the only way to explain how science works is to find relevant laws. For me, even finding relevant laws would not sufficiently explain how science works, but other modes of explanation could. This is why I see "patterns of cognition of scientists" as more appropriate than "laws" in the context above. Biogeographist (talk) 16:01, 8 July 2021 (UTC)
 * POV Fork. I almost defined what I meant by content fork when I used it. So, what I meant should have been clear. You could have replied "you to refer to POV fork here" and continue your reply with this understanding. I am still a bit disappointed that you do not say much to allow me to verify that we have a common view on POV fork.
 * Laws. Here the problem of communication is more important. You introduce a new terminology suggesting that the terminology that I use is not sufficient. But I know what I want to say and the notion  of laws that I use, which I assume you share with me (and many others) because you say so, is the correct notion to use for what I want to say. If you need a different terminology it can only mean that you did not get what I explained. Remember that the context is that you are replying to a point that I made using some terminology: laws, etc . You argue that we need a different notion than laws to achieve blah, blah, ... the purpose of science, blah, blah... I refuse to go into this, because I  used the concept of laws in a very specific context and it was the perfect notion to use for what I had to say.  I am aware that many philosophers say that science is about finding explanations and that an explanation cannot be reduced to a single constraint or single set of constraints. I agree with them about this general principle.  But, this does not invalidate the point that I was making and to which you are replying. My point relies on two concepts: the irrationality of the process that makes science progress (an irrationality that must be accepted in this discussion as   the consequence of fundamental theses and arguments) and the fact that this process respects the laws of nature. The notion of laws of nature is perfectly used here.  My point is that any apparent difficulties in the fact that the process is irrational is perfectly taken care of by the fact that it nevertheless respects the laws of nature. Dominic Mayers (talk) 18:43, 8 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Here is my last comment above POV forking at Talk:Empirical evidence. I am not sure why you want me to say more, or how it would be beneficial for me to say more. Regarding irrationalism, apparently we are making different points. My point is that what scientists do, and their patterns of cognition, is not irrational, and it is fine to speak of "justification" as part of that activity in an ordinary fallibilist sense. Biogeographist (talk) 19:37, 8 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Regarding POV fork, I responded to this point (or perhaps explained before you made this point) that we can easily not make it a POV fork. This is in fact a point that I repeated many times. Yes, sure, obviously, if we split in two articles there is a possibility to make a POV fork that is not there before the split. But this cannot be an argument against the split, because it is basically always the case in every split and it can easily be avoided, unless the purpose of the split is to hide an opposition between two points of view. So, until you explicitly agree that it's not a pertinent issue or that you explain why you see an intention to create a POV fork here, I will not be satisfied. We cannot raise a POV fork issue, which is a very serious violation of WP rules, without supporting it. Raising a POV fork issue in the abstract is not appropriate. The mere existence of controversies in the topic is not sufficient to raise the issue. You can say that you worry about POV fork in general. I worry about that too, but, if we understand the purpose of the split, we can agree together before we even edit the articles that it is easy not to create a POV fork in this particular case if we make sure that no oppositions between notable view points are hidden. Even if we do not understand the purpose of the split, it's a big deal to suggest that the purpose is to create a POV fork. Instead, one should try to understand the purpose.   Dominic Mayers (talk) 20:08, 8 July 2021 (UTC)
 * OK, I don't think that it's to create a POV fork. I can see how what I said could create the impression that I thought that, but I don't. But I don't agree with this: it is basically always the case in every split and it can easily be avoided, unless the purpose of the split is to hide an opposition between two points of view. I don't agree with this since usually when articles are split, a part of the main article is split off into another article. I have never encountered a situation where people discuss a theoretical split before there is any content to split off from a main article. And in the absence of that content, I don't believe that there is so much clarity that avoidance of a POV fork is guaranteed. Why not write the main article first (with the content of both articles in it) and then  that the content that will be split off is  a POV fork, and therefore that POV forking is not an issue? The fact that this process is happening so contrary to the way splits are usually done is what makes it uncertain . Biogeographist (talk) 20:46, 8 July 2021 (UTC)
 * You wrote: My point is that what scientists do, and their patterns of cognition, is not irrational, and it is fine to speak of "justification" as part of that activity in an ordinary fallibilist sense. Because you raise this point in opposition to the very well established traditional view that no justification exists in science and that, as Einstein said, there is no logical path to the theories of science, then I disagree. However, I repeat that the notions of "justification" and of "rationality" that are expressed here have obviously their place in the article. We must just avoid creating superficial contradiction by using the same term twice in the same article with a different meaning in each occurrence because the context is different. The contradiction is not real here. In some context, Popper would have agreed that it was very rational to accept Newton's law and later to accept Einstein's law, etc. It's obvious also that we see patterns in the way we make this kind of choices. None of this contradict what is known through Hume's argument, the Duhem-Quine thesis and the confirmation holism view, which apply to the same scientific knowledge. My point is that this apparent contradiction is resolved when we realize that the "irrational" (the term being used here in the very specific sense given by these fundamental theses and arguments) process of science respects nevertheless the laws of nature. I can add to that that we are fooled by the fact that we are living this process of science. The fact that we see patterns in this makes it appears even more as a contradiction to these fundamental theses and arguments, but there is none.  Dominic Mayers (talk) 20:41, 8 July 2021 (UTC)
 * OK, thanks. Biogeographist (talk) 20:46, 8 July 2021 (UTC)
 * You wrote: My point is that what scientists do, and their patterns of cognition, is not irrational, and it is fine to speak of "justification" as part of that activity in an ordinary fallibilist sense. Because you raise this point in opposition to the very well established traditional view that no justification exists in science and that, as Einstein said, there is no logical path to the theories of science, then I disagree. However, I repeat that the notions of "justification" and of "rationality" that are expressed here have obviously their place in the article. We must just avoid creating superficial contradiction by using the same term twice in the same article with a different meaning in each occurrence because the context is different. The contradiction is not real here. In some context, Popper would have agreed that it was very rational to accept Newton's law and later to accept Einstein's law, etc. It's obvious also that we see patterns in the way we make this kind of choices. None of this contradict what is known through Hume's argument, the Duhem-Quine thesis and the confirmation holism view, which apply to the same scientific knowledge. My point is that this apparent contradiction is resolved when we realize that the "irrational" (the term being used here in the very specific sense given by these fundamental theses and arguments) process of science respects nevertheless the laws of nature. I can add to that that we are fooled by the fact that we are living this process of science. The fact that we see patterns in this makes it appears even more as a contradiction to these fundamental theses and arguments, but there is none.  Dominic Mayers (talk) 20:41, 8 July 2021 (UTC)
 * OK, thanks. Biogeographist (talk) 20:46, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

In general, I think we may have very different default views about scientific theories; your main concerns seem to be those associated with what the SEP article "The structure of scientific theories" calls the "syntactic view" of theories, whereas my main concerns are those associated with the "pragmatic view". That may help explain, very generally, why we have a tendency to talk past each other. Biogeographist (talk) 21:02, 8 July 2021 (UTC)


 * I suppose that you refer to the discussion regarding "Laws". Could you explain your point in a more self contained manner, i.e., without relying on other articles, because I think it's important that I understand what you are saying and having to guess it from my understanding of other sources is not ideal. I am particularly interested to see how you understand my point to which you replied OK, thanks. I prefer to see your understanding and determine by myself what is meant by "OK, thanks".  Dominic Mayers (talk) 21:28, 8 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Regarding POV fork: I agree that a POV fork can easily happen in a split even without an intention to create one. It may very well be also that the unrecognized purpose is to create a POV fork. In this latter case, there is no bad intention, but the POV fork will be difficult to avoid, because, for all practical purpose, it's the intention. But, I am saying that we can rule out these cases, before we edit the article, by understanding the purpose of the split. In our case, the purpose is to have an entry point that focuses on the perspective of philosophy of science. Given that I added that any necessary link with general epistemology can be added if needed to avoid a POV fork, you should have ruled out the possibility of a POV fork. I know that it still can happen if we don't do it correctly. Still, it remains inadequate to raise the issue and say "the split is conditional to the absence of POV fork". We will discuss possible POV fork as they occur, but in the current situation, a POV fork cannot be an argument against the split. Now, there is a different issue that is raised when we do a split. Some content might receive less weight. I suspect that it's what really concern you. But, Creationism is taken out of Evolution and receive no weight at all in the latter. This might have been a concern for some people, but it's not a POV fork. Similarly, you might feel concerned that Empirical evidence (widest scope) will have less weight in Empirical evidence (philosophy of science), but that's not a POV fork issue. However, I am not pushing the analogy up to the point that it should have no weight at all in it. In fact, now that I think about it, I am open to the possibility that it will have an important weight. I have no interest in pushing out epistemology views. However, I maintain that we need an article that takes the philosophy of science perspective. This will have an effect on the order in which the concepts are presented, etc. It's a different perspective. I remember that the last time I wrote "it's a different perspective", you replied (I paraphrase) "Ha Ha, it's what we call a POV fork". This is why we had these long discussions. It's not a POV fork. And NO, I don't have to prove it to you. It's a different entry point. The purpose is not to hide an opposition. That's enough to remove any POV fork objection against the split. We will take care of POV fork issues as they arise. The split can be discussed independently of that.    Dominic Mayers (talk) 21:18, 8 July 2021 (UTC)
 * But I agree, irrespective of any POV fork issue, that we need to have an idea about the scope and organization of each article. If we use drafts, they should be restricted to the minimum needed to help explain the scope and the organization of the articles, because these are what we need. They should be discussed first before we start seriously on the articles. I don't understand why you would want to skip the step where we discuss the scope and organization of each article, but I certainly understand that some free writing can help. In fact, whenever I attempt to write a plan, I find myself doing some free writing. It helps a lot. Dominic Mayers (talk) 21:56, 8 July 2021 (UTC)
 * But I agree, irrespective of any POV fork issue, that we need to have an idea about the scope and organization of each article. If we use drafts, they should be restricted to the minimum needed to help explain the scope and the organization of the articles, because these are what we need. They should be discussed first before we start seriously on the articles. I don't understand why you would want to skip the step where we discuss the scope and organization of each article, but I certainly understand that some free writing can help. In fact, whenever I attempt to write a plan, I find myself doing some free writing. It helps a lot. Dominic Mayers (talk) 21:56, 8 July 2021 (UTC)
 * But I agree, irrespective of any POV fork issue, that we need to have an idea about the scope and organization of each article. If we use drafts, they should be restricted to the minimum needed to help explain the scope and the organization of the articles, because these are what we need. They should be discussed first before we start seriously on the articles. I don't understand why you would want to skip the step where we discuss the scope and organization of each article, but I certainly understand that some free writing can help. In fact, whenever I attempt to write a plan, I find myself doing some free writing. It helps a lot. Dominic Mayers (talk) 21:56, 8 July 2021 (UTC)


 * My last paragraph was disconnected from what came before, but could be connected in the following way: The SEP article says: "The Syntactic, Semantic, and Pragmatic views are often taken to be mutually exclusive and, thus, to be in competition with one another. They indeed make distinct claims about the anatomy of scientific theories. But one can also imagine them to be complementary, focusing on different aspects and questions of the structure of scientific theories and the process of scientific theorizing." Analogous to how these different views focus on "different aspects and questions", when I said that I doubted that "laws" was the right word and substituted "patterns of cognition of scientists", I was changing the focus to "different aspects and questions of the structure of scientific theories and the process of scientific theorizing". A focus on the cognition of agents is a more pragmatic view (which may attract me because it's more relevant to my background in biology and psychology), and a focus on laws is a more syntactic or semantic view (which may attract you because of your background in physics).
 * When I said "OK, thanks" before that, it was since I didn't find anything to comment about your previous paragraph, and I see more clearly how we are talking about "different aspects and questions". I'm not sure exactly what your last two sentences of that paragraph mean, but I doubt it is important to clarify it.
 * On POV forking, I agree that a POV fork cannot be an argument against the split at this point in time, but it is something to keep in mind. Creationism is a WP:SUBPOV, an article whose subject is a POV, and as I understand it we're not trying to do that here, so that's probably not the best example, but I get your point. By the way, "Ha Ha, it's what we call a POV fork" isn't a bad paraphrase—I was amused at the time. Hey, we're doing all this for free so we should have a little fun, right? Biogeographist (talk) 22:08, 8 July 2021 (UTC)


 * Regarding POV forking, sure we must always worry about respecting every WP rule, especially when there are big changes, but it should not be necessary to even mention it.
 * Regarding "Laws", I just went quickly over the SEP article and I am very disappointed that you assume that I use the syntactic approach and I would also be disappointed had you said that I use the semantic approach. I have no idea what can make you think that. I read about the syntactic and the semantic approaches and they are very specific approaches. The syntactic is well known as dead and I have not committed myself to any specific view such as the semantic view. I suspect that you confused the syntactic approach with the distinction made by Popper and others between knowledge that can be expressed as statements to which logic can be applied and subjective knowledge that can be explained in a more biological manner. For example, Popper consider that subjective knowledge is important to have the big picture. He viewed expectations and anticipations, which even an amoeba  can have, as knowledge. If we do not make the distinction between subjective knowledge that is more like physical knowledge and objective knowledge that can be written as statements, then of course all arguments about science fails, including Hume's argument, because it's too vague and nothing about science can be said to be true or false. In a way, Popper introduced subjective knowledge to explain in which way Hume's argument (and any other argument for that matter) does not apply to the totality of knowledge. The view that scientific knowledge, at the least the part that we hope can be justified, can be represented by statements to which we can apply logic is so basic and universally accepted that thinking of it as a view opposed to a pragmatical view is non sense.


 * To claim that this very general approach excludes concepts such as patterns used for discovery of laws is non sense. They are not the laws of nature that I needed to make my point or equations or constraints used to separate the possible observation statements into those that respect the constraints and those that do not, but they have their place in the very universal picture that is offered in the above view. Quantum Mechanics as a framework is also not a constraint or a law by itself. It's a metaphysical program. It can also be seen as a pattern. Clearly, scientists have used this pattern many times to conjecture laws. These patterns are an important part of our background knowledge together with the specific laws that we have already accepted.  This does not contradict at all the more fundamental statements that the overall process of science is irrational. It's totally consistent with Popper's view that there is room for metaphysical knowledge within this overall irrational process of science. I think the term "metaphysical knowledge" is a bit unfortunate, because there is a pejorative connotation associated with it, but Popper did not attach any pejorative connotation to it. I am not sure that sources  have described these patterns as meta physical knowledge and, in this way, made the link  with Popper's language. If we don't find these sources, we will not be able to make the link either. But, we should not either present these patterns as if they were opposed to the well known irrationality of the overall process of science.  Please do not just reply "OK, thanks", because the way I see it, it means that you consider that we have adopted different views and you use this to explain the apparent contradiction. This is not an acceptable way out and the outcome will not be good for the readers.  We must make sure that we can understand each other in a common view. In particular, we must understand these patterns together with other notions (laws of nature, equations, formula, etc.) within this common view. Dominic Mayers (talk) 01:01, 9 July 2021 (UTC)


 * On POV forking: It is a good idea to mention it when someone starts talking about splitting an article into two different perspectives, as you did. Even if we agree that it is not a POV fork (unless something goes wrong), at least we will be better prepared to prevent it from becoming a POV fork than if nobody had raised the issue.
 * You wrote: If we do not make the distinction between subjective knowledge that is more like physical knowledge and objective knowledge that can be written as statements, then of course all arguments about science fails, including Hume's argument, because it's too vague and nothing about science can be said to be true or false. I see the focus on "knowledge that can be written as statements" as very close to the syntactic view. It is an important aspect of science, but is not the whole story of scientific theorizing, which can include other important kinds of representational artifacts. Focusing on how all these artifacts are used together in scientific practice would be the pragmatic view. The view that scientific knowledge, at the least the part that we hope can be justified, can be represented by statements to which we can apply logic is so basic and universally accepted that thinking of it as a view opposed to a pragmatical view is non sense. I don't see them as "opposed", they are just different emphases on aspects of scientific theorizing; as the SEP article says: "They indeed make distinct claims about the anatomy of scientific theories. But one can also imagine them to be complementary, focusing on different aspects and questions of the structure of scientific theories and the process of scientific theorizing". So don't worry that I think we have opposed views that are incommensurable (here I am using "incommensurable" metaphorically; it is not exactly the right word). I do not believe in what Popper rightly called the "myth" of incommensurable frameworks.
 * I am not sure that sources have described these patterns as metaphysical knowledge and, in this way, made the link with Popper's language. If we don't find these sources, we will not be able to make the link either. Mario Bunge is an example of someone who wrote a lot about metaphysics in science (or scientific metaphysics) throughout his career. Some edited collections on the metaphysics and science have been published recently. And there is also the subject of metametaphysics and science!
 * You said: the well known irrationality of the overall process of science. I could agree with this if it said "the well known irrational of the overall process of science". Characterizing the overall process of science as "irrational" is disputed. Michael Friedman is an example of a philosopher who has spent his career investigating and arguing for "the trans-historical rationality of the entire process" of science. Biogeographist (talk) 16:02, 9 July 2021 (UTC)


 * Regarding POV Fork, I think you should apologize to suggest that I and other editors needed to be told by you that they should avoid a POV fork only because there is a split to obtain a different entry point that is very well defined. (Every new entry point offers a different perspective.) Perhaps, if the entry point was unclear, the question of the purpose could be raised, but here "Philosophy of science" is a well defined entry point. Dominic Mayers (talk) 16:25, 9 July 2021 (UTC)


 * No, I am not going to apologize. It's a legitimate issue. As I already mentioned, I have doubts about how separate philosophy of science should be from epistemology. Biogeographist (talk) 16:27, 9 July 2021 (UTC) and 16:29, 9 July 2021 (UTC)
 * My position is that, in all cases, we should have an article with philosophy of science as the entry point. This article would make use of epistemology concepts as they have been applied to science. This article should also extend to contexts outside science, because it's related. I see your issue as asking if we need another article with a different entry point, which will be the main article for that extension and for all applications of epistemology to science. Having only one article with a middle entry point that is both philosophy of science and epistemology is not an option. To continue this discussion, we would need to have a better idea of the scope and organization of both articles—with drafts restricted to the minimum needed to explain these scopes and organizations. Dominic Mayers (talk) 16:55, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

Dominic Mayers's reply III
You wrote: I see the focus on "knowledge that can be written as statements" as very close to the syntactic view. I see two problems with this statement. First, there is a false presumption in this statement that the focus is entirely on knowledge that can be written as statements. The distinction between the two types of knowledge is important and to make a distinction clear, there is a need for some focus on both sides. For example, Popper discussed a lot the role of subjective knowledge. Second, the concept of knowledge that can be written as statements is very general whereas the syntactic view is much more specific. So, one cannot be close to the other. For example, I see the semantic view as making use of statements, which receive meaning through the semantic. Also, Popper did not care about defining two languages, one for objects and another for theoretical concepts as is the case in the syntactic view. It was sufficient for him to say that some statements received the status of basic statements—he felt no need to be more specific. More importantly, I refer to "knowledge that can be written as statements" only to distinguish knowledge where Hume's argumemt, the Duhem-Quine's thesis and the confirmation holism view apply from other kind of knowledge that is less well defined and with which no such arguments can be made. Hume or Duhem or Quine did not make any reference to the syntactic view to make their point. So, it's not really needed. If you say that they did, then you are referring to a very general view, not the syntactic view that is described in SEP. Dominic Mayers (talk) 18:08, 9 July 2021 (UTC)
 * First, there is a false presumption in this statement that the focus is entirely on knowledge that can be written as statements. Not "entirely". The SEP article mentions that the other views don't (and can't?) completely ignore pragmatics, but the focus of the syntactic view is on theory structure as sentences. Second, the concept of knowledge that can be written as statements is very general whereas the syntactic view is much more specific. Yes, the SEP article does get into the details as analyzed by Carnap, Hempel, and others. But apart from the details, the most important common factor in the syntactic view is the view of theory structure as sentences: another author even says that "sentential view" is a synonym of "syntactic view". The semantic view focuses on theory structure as mathematical models. Hume or Duhem or Quine did not make any reference to the syntactic view to make their point. Hume and Duhem belonged to earlier eras before the rise of what's called the syntactic view, but I wouldn't be surprised if Quine fits into the syntactic view generally conceived. Biogeographist (talk) 22:13, 9 July 2021 (UTC)
 * In that case, this classification gives the false impression that something deep is being said, but actually it refers to a very common notion that has been used by Hume, Duhem, Quine, Popper, etc. as well as in ancient Greek and Indian philosophies. It does not contradict anything that I wrote, nor does it add some something useful to it. The distinction between subjective knowledge (as defined by Popper and most likely defined under a different terminology by others) and other kind of knowledge (usually knowledge that can be written as statements, but any other objective way that can be used in Hume's argument, etc. would do as well) is the key point. This key point hold irrespective of this classification that you introduced. My understanding is that the key aspect of subjective knowledge is that it might not be objectively formulated, but it has the possibility to include the solution together with the problem. The use of subjective knowledge makes the process irrational, but because it respects the laws of nature it contribute to evolution as we often see it in nature. The confusing point is that this subjective knowledge is usually used together with objective patterns, etc. Sure, the use of these objective patterns can be said to be rational and justified, but this a different manner of using the terms "rational" and "justified". It does not change the situation. It still remains that without subjective knowledge there will be no progress, as clearly argued by Hume. Because subjective knowledge is used we can say the process is irrational (in a different use of the term). There is no contradiction. It just a question of where we decide to put our attention. If we put our attention on the fact that these objective patterns are used and pragmatically we see that it works, then we say that it's rational. OTOH, when we you refer to Hume's argument, which still applies,  you must conclude that globally the process is irrational: if it depends on subjective knowledge in anyway, as it must (because otherwise we defeated a well known and yet uncontested argument), it is irrational. I have the impression that, for some people, the pragmatic approach means that we don't need to consider the separation between subjective and objective knowledge and we only consider that patterns are used and as a final outcome we see that knowledge progresses, but this will be a kind of POV fork where we deliberately reject a deeper and valid perspective that perfectly applies to the question that is being studied. I must emphasize a point here. Clearly, many processes that are used with these patterns are completely rational, but this is like when we use deduction to falsify a theory. This is also a process that is entirely rational. Nothing special here. In fact, it's the whole point of Popper's philosophy that there is room for rationality in science. So, sure there are processes that involve these patterns that are totally rational, which is compatible with Popper's main point. Yet, if we look carefully, no progress can be justified using only these processes. If you look carefully, it will be seen that some irrational decision must be referred to if you want to "justify" progress.  Dominic Mayers (talk) 23:20, 9 July 2021 (UTC)


 * The distinction between the syntactic view and the pragmatic view in the SEP article does not appear to me to be equivalent to what Popper calls objective and subjective knowledge. Whether the distinction is "deep" or not is of no interest to me. And I wouldn't speak of "justifying" progress; progress is not justified, but retrospectively evaluated. Biogeographist (talk) 11:59, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Of course, it is not equivalent. I am saying that it has essentially nothing to do with it and thus I questioned why you raised this other distinction as a way to explain our disagreement regarding the importance of the role of subjective knowledge versus objective knowledge to explain irrationality in science. If I expressed that it was not "deep", it should be appreciated in this context. Regarding your other point, I don't know that we have a rigorous way to evaluate progress in science even retrospectively. This is what Lakatos, as an historian of science, attempted to do and he failed. Obviously, we all agree that science progress and thus we somehow can evaluate progress, but as far as we know this is just the power of subjective knowledge at play. This point only corroborates what I am trying to explain. Dominic Mayers (talk) 13:11, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Progress in science has been explained by analyzing limited cases, but asking whether there is progress in science overall is probably as unanswerable as asking whether there is progress in history overall, unless one defines the issue much more narrowly. Biogeographist (talk) 15:18, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

Regarding the adequacy of the term "irrational"
If we say science is irrational, we make reference to the fact that just like animals, we follow our feelings, etc. and we have not succeeded to explain our decisions in terms of rules. Not only we have not succeeded, but we have Hume's argument that strongly suggests that we cannot as far as explaining how our knowledge progress. In a way, I like the use of the term "irrational" in that context, because it suggests some modesty in the way we see our place in nature. But, at the same time, from a different angle, the term is totally inadequate, because it would mean that rationality does not exist even when we use science to evaluate medical treatments, to build a rocket to go to the moon, etc. So, we have two meanings of the term "rational". In one meaning, science is irrational. In the other meaning, perhaps the most common meaning, it is rational. However, these are not opposite views. Science is both irrational in one meaning and rational in another meaning. They are different meanings of a same term that create a superficial syntactical contradition, not two views that are semantically in contradiction. Dominic Mayers (talk) 14:07, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
 * That is a nice way of putting it. I would emphasize an aspect of rationality described in a reference that I mentioned above—namely, metacognitive understanding and control: "First, even within the logical domain, a metacognitive conception of rationality locates rationality in metalogical understanding and control rather than in logic . Second, a metacognitive conception acknowledges that rationality may develop through reflection on and coordination of heuristics and norms more subtle than the rules of formal logic. ... Rationality includes metacognitive knowledge and control of a variety of inferences. Rationality is thus much richer than logic, and its development can be expected to be more diverse." This metacognitive understanding and control is largely subjective, but can be and has been objectively documented by psychologists to some extent, and therefore can be taught. Biogeographist (talk) 15:18, 10 July 2021 (UTC)


 * This metacognitive understanding and control is largely subjective, but can be and has been objectively documented by psychologists to some extent, and therefore can be taught. I have not seen the details, but I have nothing in principle against this, especially given the acknowledgment of subjectivity. Regarding specific examples of empirical evidence in science, I feel the first thing to cover are the usual statistical methods. These are easily placed in the view of an "irrational" science, as it is the case for all use of evidence in science. It's no more weird of speaking of irrationality here than saying that our acceptation of General Relativity and other well established laws of physics is also ultimately irrational, which is what Hume's argument, etc. say. It may feel like an unpractical point to make, but this feeling is a misguided attitude. On the contrary, it's very important to clearly see how and where subjectivity enters into play in what we call empirical evidence. In the case of standard statistical tests, it corresponds to the usual attitude of being aware that the null hypothesis is a conjectured assumption and when it is not rejected, it's nothing more than a corroboration of that assumption. Except in rare cases where there is a higher level assumption, there is no logical path toward this assumption and a corroboration is not a logical justification. Conversely, a rejection of that assumption also suffers from the Duhem-Quine thesis against falsification. Clearly, we see that statistical evidence fit perfectly in the view of science as an "irrational" process. Dominic Mayers (talk) 16:14, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
 * If you are discussing the content of the article, you should go back to the article talk page and discuss it there, with references to the sources that you are using to verify the content. Also, I think it would be important to connect hypotheses and evidence to the that scientists are trying to solve. The justification for using particular theories or for using particular methods of testing hypotheses probably wouldn't make much sense disconnected from problems. Biogeographist (talk) 17:25, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Actually, there is also the opposite principle that when we discuss a general principle, we must be careful not to rely too much on a particular case. Not that I am against examples, but examples never establish general principles in themselves. This being said, I agree that it's now time to see how useful has been this long discussion. My position regarding the next step is still the same: we need a better idea of the scope and organization of both articles. Drafts must be restricted to the minimum needed to explain these scopes and organizations. Hopefully, this long discussion will be reflected in the scope and the organization of each article. Dominic Mayers (talk) 17:42, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Good, but I think what I meant by did not come through; I meant the general concept of, equivalent to the general concepts of hypothesis, testable consequence, test, evidence, theory, etc. Biogeographist (talk) 17:54, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
 * It's true that we must share the same problem in any discussion and when we write an article, we must not mix sources that address different problems, because that would mean that we use at the least some the sources, if not all of them, out of context. In my view, the main question is what do we mean in general when we say that some experimental data is empirical evidence for some scientific knowledge, especially when the knowledge extend beyond the data. Dominic Mayers (talk) 18:12, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm still not sure that what I meant was communicated. I meant that it can be said that theories, tests, and evidence are always related to some problem that scientists are trying to solve, which is an important part of the context of scientific evidence.

It occurred to me that it may be better to differentiate and. usually connotes some kind of failure to be rational. The aspects of cognition that are not rational but are also not failures to be rational are better called. Herbert A. Simon made a similar distinction (not to imply that Simon's definitions are the best, but roughly relevant):

"We talk about the, the, and the . I don't mean anything very complicated by rational. Behavior is rational, and the decisions leading up to behavior are rational if it turns out that the behavior prescribed is well adapted to its goals—whatever those goals might be. Rationality is the set of skills or aptitudes we use to see if we can get from here to there—to find courses of action that will lead to the accomplishment of our goals. Action is rational to the degree that it is well adapted to those goals. Decisions are rational to the extent that they lead to such action.

Irrational? Well, that is easy then. Irrational means poorly adapted to goals. As far as I can see, there is no such thing as excessive rationality; we use that phrase glibly but doubtfully. When you accuse somebody of being excessively rational, you must have something else in mind. You must have a quarrel with that person's goals and not with his or her thinking.

Nonrational reminds us of something else again. It reminds us that the goals themselves have to be postulated somehow in the decision-making process, except insofar as certain goals may themselves be instrumental to other goals: We go to school in order to get an education—or so we tell students they ought to. But somewhere there has to be a fulcrum for the whole business. As Archimedes said, "If someone will give me a foundation for my fulcrum I can move the whole world." But he needed a foundation.

Those final goals, the things that somehow or other we regard as the ends in themselves (except insofar as they have side consequences and except insofar as they really are thought of as implementing other goals) have nothing to do with rationality. They must come from somewhere else. I will use the term nonrational to refer to those aspects of the decision process that relate to these very final goals."

Biogeographist (talk) 16:21, 11 July 2021 (UTC)


 * I agree that "nonrational" is a better term, because "irrational" has a pejorative connotation, but it seems that the above definition of "nonrational" is too limited to refer to the distinction between subjective and objective made by Popper. The concept of ultimate goals does not capture the notion of subjectivity, because they could be formulated in some objective manner. Popper uses the terms "expectation" and "anticipation" to refer to knowledge that precedes objective knowledge. These terms might seem to correspond to goals, but if they were only that, we could not explain how they translated into objective laws in our mind after interaction with the environment. Popper insists, as a non mysticist, that this interaction involves trials and errors. This is essentially what distinguishes Popper from Hume. Just like Hume, he believed in some nonrational process that leads to laws in our mind, but this process, for Popper, is done through trials and errors. It seems to correspond to what we see in nature, but still the fact remains that these expectations and anticipations, how they relate to the environment and how they evolved and continue to evolve can lead to new objective laws that say more than previously known laws.  In that sense, they somehow contain a path toward new objective laws, something that objective knowledge does not offer in accordance with Hume's argument, even with repetitions and trials and errors. These two great philosophers came to similar conclusions, but Popper used the evolutionary and trials and errors aspects. Kant, another great philosopher,  used the concept of fixed apriori to address the issue. In a way, Popper also uses a fixed apriori—the true laws of nature that lead to these expectations and anticipations are his fixed apriori, but they work with trials and errors. The distinction between subjective and objective is fundamental in Popper anti-inductivist argument. Popper says that trials and errors "simulate" induction, but if it was not for the distinction between subjective and objective knowledge, the distinction between "simulated" induction and actual induction would be empty. The key point is that subjective knowledge is also biological knowledge (in fact the term biological knowledge seems better to me). Because it's biological it creates  a bridge toward the laws of nature. It might not be objectively formulated, but it contains a lot through its uses of the laws of nature. It may require trials and errors, but still it contains a lot more than our superficially formulated objective knowledge. So, if we call this induction, then it's a completely different kind of induction unique to subjective knowledge.

Dominic Mayers (talk) 17:43, 11 July 2021 (UTC)


 * Popper insists, as a non mysticist, that this interaction involves trials and errors. That's a good summary of Popper's philosophy, but how the mind works is largely an empirical question, which is why the research of psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, and similar scientists is so important. Biogeographist (talk) 17:53, 11 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Well, I cannot rigorously argue against this hope. There is no proof that we will not someday formulate objectively the ultimate pattern for the discovery of new laws of nature. This hope has lead great philosophers such as Lakatos to search with no success their entire life for only a method to evaluate the progress in science—it's easier to find a method to evaluate a progress than to find a method to create that progress. Certainly, we can hope that neurophysiology, etc. will help us toward this goal. However, thus far, as far as I can tell, there has been no success.  There has been a lot of progress in a related goal: find patterns that accompany the nonrational process of science. All statistical methods are example of that.  They are tools to make good tests that rule out as much as possible other explanations besides a proposed explanation. There exist also tools to help the nonrational part of us to make new conjectures. But it always remain within the (nonrational) conjectures and tests approach. BTW, I don't like the terminology "conjectures and refutations". I would have preferred "conjectures, tests and problems". Even when the goal is to propose a theory, we can take the perspective that the tests are designed to create problems with the alternative explanations. For example, when we look for white swans, we can think that we create a problem for all theories of the form "All swans are C" where C is not white. If we keep seeing white swans, we even create problem for theories of the form "The ratio of white swans in any area containing 1000 swans or more is r", where r is close to 1, but not 1. We don't justify "All swans are white", but create problems for natural alternatives. The creation of problems is the "rational" in "critical rationalism", but globally it is nonrational: the problems steer the nonrational process. Of course, if we have an higher level conjecture, then it may be that a method under this higher level conjecture can rationally deduce new laws. This must exist in AI research and in similar fields of study,  but still it remains within the high level conjecture. This higher level conjecture has necessarily a restricted scope of applications, because otherwise we would have conjectured the ultimate pattern of discovery that I mentioned above and experienced its success.   I am not saying the idea of this ultimate pattern is stupid. It's a fine idea, but the best way to help find it is to honestly see how far we are from it. This is why the distinction between subjective and objective knowledge is important. Without an understanding of this distinction,  we can easily confuse tools that help the nonrational with tools to be used entirely rationally. I guess I could simply have replied with this last sentence, which says sure we can look for methods to discover laws, but it remains very useful to see the distinction between subjective and non objective knowledge, because otherwise we might be confuse about what exactly has been achieved by the methods.   Dominic Mayers (talk) 19:45, 11 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Much of that is, again, a good summary of Popper's philosophy, but there are people who say that we can do without Popper's subjective/objective knowledge (or three worlds) distinction, and that there are better ways of talking about scientific theory: for example, philosopher Steven French's recent book There Are No Such Things As Theories. French summarized his view in an interview, saying that theories "are not abstract artefacts, inhabiting World 3, nor are they fictions, nor anything else. ... scientists' talk about theories is made true, not by the properties of some abstract entity or their engagement with a game of make believe but by the relevant . So, for example, the claim that 'quantum mechanics is empirically adequate' can still be taken to be true but what makes it so is not some feature of quantum mechanics regarded as some thing or entity, whether abstract artefact or fiction or whatever, but rather the relevant features of . In this case, these practices will obviously have to do with what goes on in the laboratory as well as everything that is involved in bringing theoretical claims and data together. ... So, just as the metaphysical eliminativist insists that there are no tables, just 'table shaped' collections of elementary particles so I argue that there are no theories (or models), just theory shaped bits of practice! However, I don't think that should disturb anyone (except maybe Popperians and fictionalists), because to say that there are no theories in the above sense shouldn't be taken to undermine the efforts of scientists in developing and presenting theories and models, including those used to model the current pandemic. What makes it true that a given model is adequate-for-purpose, say, are the relevant practices involved in developing and testing and applying the model and insofar as we can rely on those practices, we can rely 'on' the model (even though there is no such thing!)."


 * Steven French's view of theories strikes me as very compatible with Barry Allen's definition of knowledge as "superlative artifactual performance". Both French and Allen, in different words, emphasize knowledge as practice.
 * When one metaphysically eliminates Popper's World 3, then one has to find a different way to define "rational" that does not depend on what has been eliminated. Biogeographist (talk) 14:44, 12 July 2021 (UTC)
 * The concept that some nonrational must be involved in science is not a low weight concept that can be discarded. It is advanced by Hume, Kant, Popper and many other philosophers in different manners. The form taken by this concept in Popper's philosophy is the notion of subjective knowledge, but not of a same kind as in Hume. In Kant, it takes the form of apriori that do not need to be rationally justified. Obviously, there exists some opposition to the proposal that much of science belong to the nonrational. The easiest way to reject this idea is to say that we can do without the distinction rational versus nonrational, but those who advance this kind of arguments also ignore all the theses and arguments against a purely rational science, which Popper, Hume, Kant and others have honestly considered. Nevertheless, if there are many modern philosophers that support the idea that "we can do without the duality rational/nonrational", which, unfortunately, would not surprise me that much, we should give due weight to this point of view.
 * Whether theories exist or are constructions to describe practice is not related to this question. It's related to whether we can identify objective knowledge in the duality subjective/objective with the third world. It says that we cannot, because the entities in the third word are not really the theories. This is not important in our discussion of the duality nonrational/rational, which goes way beyond Popper's philosophy, though I feel that Popper's view of this duality in terms of the duality subjective-biological versus objective knowledge  is the easiest to understand and accept nowadays.  Dominic Mayers (talk) 15:51, 12 July 2021 (UTC)
 * I feel that Popper's view of this duality in terms of the duality subjective-biological versus objective knowledge is the easiest to understand and accept nowadays. I understand that's how you feel, but I wonder how many other alternatives you have considered. It's important to avoid original research on Wikipedia, so if/when you edit the articles, I am looking forward to seeing which references you will cite. Biogeographist (talk) 16:32, 12 July 2021 (UTC)
 * We have Hume, Kant and Popper. This is already pretty good and there are recent authors that refer to them in this manner or related manner. If you are talking about ways to avoid inserting this nonrational aspect, it will be very difficult to find sources that do it explicitly (i.e. with reference to Hume, Kant, etc.), because this position is too hard to defend. Please try to prove me wrong here if you can. What we will find is sources that confuse things by misinterpreting the issue, for example, by questioning a particular definition of "theory". Is a theory, something formulated in a sentence or is it something that is only meaningful as much as it determines some practices? It is so easy to get lost in details by asking this kind of questions. The three worlds of Popper are very specific and it is easy to criticize some definitions that are implicit in this view. The duality rational/nonrational is robust and independent of definition details. The rational part is the part that can be expressed by universal rules that apply to a body of knowledge, which we call the objective knowledge. We must not get caught into details here. The nonrational part have been inferred by Hume, Kant and Popper because it's clear that we cannot explain the growth of objective knowledge otherwise. Kant explained  the growth of knowledge up to Newton's law only. Kant's apriori could not explain General relativity and Quantum Mechanics, but the basic idea is there: the purpose was to explain what rational rules applied to objective knowledge could not explain.  Of course, if someone refuses to consider the existence of a body of objective knowledge as defined above, a definition that corresponds very well to Hume's, Kant's and Popper's view, say by arguing that we should only care about what must be done in practice, as if this was not the primary goal of considering the nonrational part, then nothing can be said about the nonrational part. That can make some people that want to use science as a religion happy and be very detrimental to what we actually do in practice.
 * This being said my original position was that the current article Scientific evidence was a good draft to explain the scope and organization of the article. Indeed, references to Popper and Mayo give an idea of the scope.  I never really appreciated what was the purpose of another article Empirical evidence. In my view, the general perspective presented by great philosophers such as Popper, Duhem, etc. on the role of observations together with what is evidence in the work of Mayo and others that consider evidence in modern science cover the most important. The only explanation that I found for a second article is that we want epistemology as another entry point. But, I am confuse because, at the same time, you seem to argue that it should not be a different entry point. It is as if you want to give more importance to some authors on the basis that they add the epistemological view, but at the same time argue that epistemology is not really a different view. I must say that this recent discussion about the nonrational aspect of science, which is necessary for a non fanatical understanding of practical modern science, statistical tests, etc., make me change my mind about the validity of an extra entry point based on epistemology. In this manner, I am agreeing with you that epistemology cannot really be a different perspective. In particular, it does not matter what entry point we use, the role of the nonrational part cannot be avoided. Accepting the nonrational part is simply the correct non fanatical attitude in science. I am sure that we will find authors that avoid this aspect of science (by getting lost in definition details to avoid actually addressing the arguments) and I agree that we should present their view, but we are not forced to present the views superficially. (Often, these authors are not really in opposition to the fundamental theses and arguments for the nonrational part, but like to criticize other philosophers, say Popper's three worlds, which is completely different.) In any case, reducing the weight given to the nonrational aspect of science in one of the article would be a POV fork. Dominic Mayers (talk) 20:02, 12 July 2021 (UTC)
 * This being said my original position was that the current article Scientific evidence was a good draft to explain the scope and organization of the article. Indeed, references to Popper and Mayo give an idea of the scope.  I never really appreciated what was the purpose of another article Empirical evidence. In my view, the general perspective presented by great philosophers such as Popper, Duhem, etc. on the role of observations together with what is evidence in the work of Mayo and others that consider evidence in modern science cover the most important. The only explanation that I found for a second article is that we want epistemology as another entry point. But, I am confuse because, at the same time, you seem to argue that it should not be a different entry point. It is as if you want to give more importance to some authors on the basis that they add the epistemological view, but at the same time argue that epistemology is not really a different view. I must say that this recent discussion about the nonrational aspect of science, which is necessary for a non fanatical understanding of practical modern science, statistical tests, etc., make me change my mind about the validity of an extra entry point based on epistemology. In this manner, I am agreeing with you that epistemology cannot really be a different perspective. In particular, it does not matter what entry point we use, the role of the nonrational part cannot be avoided. Accepting the nonrational part is simply the correct non fanatical attitude in science. I am sure that we will find authors that avoid this aspect of science (by getting lost in definition details to avoid actually addressing the arguments) and I agree that we should present their view, but we are not forced to present the views superficially. (Often, these authors are not really in opposition to the fundamental theses and arguments for the nonrational part, but like to criticize other philosophers, say Popper's three worlds, which is completely different.) In any case, reducing the weight given to the nonrational aspect of science in one of the article would be a POV fork. Dominic Mayers (talk) 20:02, 12 July 2021 (UTC)
 * This being said my original position was that the current article Scientific evidence was a good draft to explain the scope and organization of the article. Indeed, references to Popper and Mayo give an idea of the scope.  I never really appreciated what was the purpose of another article Empirical evidence. In my view, the general perspective presented by great philosophers such as Popper, Duhem, etc. on the role of observations together with what is evidence in the work of Mayo and others that consider evidence in modern science cover the most important. The only explanation that I found for a second article is that we want epistemology as another entry point. But, I am confuse because, at the same time, you seem to argue that it should not be a different entry point. It is as if you want to give more importance to some authors on the basis that they add the epistemological view, but at the same time argue that epistemology is not really a different view. I must say that this recent discussion about the nonrational aspect of science, which is necessary for a non fanatical understanding of practical modern science, statistical tests, etc., make me change my mind about the validity of an extra entry point based on epistemology. In this manner, I am agreeing with you that epistemology cannot really be a different perspective. In particular, it does not matter what entry point we use, the role of the nonrational part cannot be avoided. Accepting the nonrational part is simply the correct non fanatical attitude in science. I am sure that we will find authors that avoid this aspect of science (by getting lost in definition details to avoid actually addressing the arguments) and I agree that we should present their view, but we are not forced to present the views superficially. (Often, these authors are not really in opposition to the fundamental theses and arguments for the nonrational part, but like to criticize other philosophers, say Popper's three worlds, which is completely different.) In any case, reducing the weight given to the nonrational aspect of science in one of the article would be a POV fork. Dominic Mayers (talk) 20:02, 12 July 2021 (UTC)


 * You wrote: if someone refuses to consider the existence of a body of objective knowledge as defined above, a definition that corresponds very well to Hume's, Kant's and Popper's view, say by arguing that we should only care about what must be done in practice, as if this was not the primary goal of considering the nonrational part, then nothing can be said about the nonrational part. I wouldn't equate the and : Michael Friedman's account of the  focuses on what he calls  in scientific practice as it developed over multiple generations of scientists through historically changing standards of rationality, a process that nevertheless preserves "the trans-historical rationality of the entire process" in Friedman's account. Friedman goes into great detail in his writings about how Kant needs to be corrected. I don't know what Friedman would say about Hume, but I would guess he would say that in retrospect we could say that Hume was too ignorant of the history of science to understand the dynamics of reason, which is ironic since Hume was also a celebrated historian, but  a historian of science. For Friedman, what the  must be relativized to is a particular state of knowledge in the history of science, and the dynamics of reason that led to this state of knowledge can't simply be called biological or nonrational. Here is a taste of Friedman's argumentation in his book The Dynamics of Reason: "This distinction between logical and real possibility—as a counterpart to the original Kantian notion of constitutivity (note 17 above)—helps to illuminate the sense in which our conception of empirical testing and evidence is also essentially stronger than the traditional hypothetico-deductive account. For the hypothetico-deductive account appeals only to inferential relations defined by formal logic; and, unless special measures are employed, it is therefore easily vulnerable to Duhemian and Quinean holism. Theoretical propositions relate to the empirical evidence they logically imply simply as parts of a logical conjunction, and the evidence in question can then only be viewed as a test of this conjunction as a whole. In our present conception, by contrast, physical coordinating principles are just as much essential parts of the network of empirical evidential relationships as are the principles of logic and mathematics. An empirical test of Einstein's field equations by the advance of the perihelion of Mercury therefore counts as an empirical reason, in the present sense, for accepting these field equations as empirically true, but it does not count, in the same sense, as an empirical reason for accepting the principle of equivalence. Indeed, as we have seen, if the principle of equivalence is not already accepted prior to this procedure, it cannot generate empirical evidence for Einstein's equations at all—which rather, without the principle of equivalence, revert to being merely logically possible."


 * You wrote: the general perspective presented by great philosophers such as Popper, Duhem, etc. on the role of observations together with what is evidence in the work of Mayo and others that consider evidence in modern science cover the most important. That sounds like basically the scope of the two books on scientific evidence that I cited at Talk:Empirical evidence.
 * You wrote: at the same time, you seem to argue that it should not be a different entry point. You seem to assume that my role in the discussion is to defend a single position. That's not how I see my role. Instead, I try to contribute issues, positions, and arguments that have not yet been contributed, and thereby to expand the discussion. That is also why I am not so concerned about non sequiturs when I comment.
 * You wrote: I am agreeing with you that epistemology cannot really be a different perspective. Yes, I would say that merging Scientific evidence into Empirical evidence is not off the table, and in particular I think that my suggestion to edit Empirical evidence into such a state that Scientific evidence becomes irrelevant, and thus a candidate for conversion to a simple redirect, is a good option. Biogeographist (talk) 23:32, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

Dominic Mayers's Reply's IV
I am only interested in writing articles that present a coherent synthesis of the different points of view in the topic. It's a difficult challenge, because it cannot be OR. Fortunately, when a topic is very old, usually there are so many syntheses already done that it is possible for editors to present their own synthesis and yet not doing original research. For example, it may very well be that Friedman is somehow doing a synthesis of contributions of other philosophers. What I am not interested is to present Friedman view and then someone else view almost in parallel as if there was no connection. I trust that philosophers are not so much in opposition with each others, even if they tend to emphasize the differences among them. For example, Popper insisted so much on the difference between him and Lakatos, but other philosophers that analysed their work saw way more similarity than differences. It's true that there are fundamental differences and I can understand why Popper focused on them, but when I do a synthesis, I am only interested in mentioning the difference in the context of the similarities and only after the common knowledge is established. Similarly, I first see the similarity between Hume, Kant and Popper: they all have in common to have accepted the importance of nonrationality in science. Most likely many philosophers have noticed this similarity. This is the kind of content that I think help to present a coherent synthesis of the different views. This is way more useful for the readers than focusing primarily on what Friedman found incorrect in Kant. Obviously Kant, Hume and Popper are contradicted by other philosophers, but this is of secondary value when the goal is to write a useful synthesis. You wrote I try to contribute issues, positions, and arguments that have not yet been contributed, and thereby to expand the discussion. Your way to accomplish that seems to be looking for contradictions. You typically point that author X contradicted author Y, usually after I have mentioned Y's point of view. Perhaps this is what you mean by expand the discussion, but this is useless, too much at the horizontal level. What is needed is to go deeper at the vertical level and from there see how the points of view are related. I know it may seem difficult to do that and not do original research, but, again, because the topic is very old it should be possible. So, I am not responding to your point regarding Friedman. The only thing it says to me is that I should perhaps read it and do the hard work of seeing the common knowledge, but then I am not sure I would start with philosophers that you mention, because you did not select them with the right purpose in mind. The logic is the following. If we can find a core of philosophers that all agree on content X, then content X should have a greater weight. I am more interested in first establishing these contents that should have a greater weight. Dominic Mayers (talk) 01:17, 13 July 2021 (UTC)
 * This is way more useful for the readers than focusing primarily on what Friedman found incorrect in Kant. But I never suggested discussing what Friedman found incorrect in Kant in the Wikipedia article! I already said that discussion of the content of the article should happen on the article talk page, not here. My point was not that Friedman "contradicted" Popper, much less Kant, but that he had an important alternative account of rationality in science and scientific philosophy. There are differences that are more subtle than simple contradiction. Friedman has been called "perhaps the most influential rationalist in present-day philosophy of science, a field currently resting primarily on empiricist grounds", so he is not obscure or irrelevant to the discussion above about rational and nonrational. I was not very interested in Friedman in the past, but it is interesting to think about his work in the context of this discussion. More relevant to the article, the current Empirical evidence article mentions the distinction, and theory-ladenness, and the  is far from irrelevant to both of those topics.
 * Obviously Kant, Hume and Popper are contradicted by other philosophers, but this is of secondary value when the goal is to write a useful synthesis. Ignoring important alternatives and presenting all of philosophy of science as a path to Popper's philosophy is a good way to write an article that doesn't come close to hitting the WP:NPOV target.
 * What is needed is to go deeper at the vertical level and from there see how the points of view are related. As I see it, we get to the deeper level or  seeing how the points of view are related. But I don't oppose guessing what the deeper level is: Perhaps it is the question "What is the foundation of scientific rationality?" In Popper's later philosophy, if I'm not mistaken (you would know better than I do), the foundation is the evolutionary process of blind variation and selective retention (evolutionary epistemology). In Friedman's philosophy, the foundation is the historical dynamics of reason (historical epistemology). Both of them would be opposed to traditional empiricist epistemology, on the one hand, and to a rationalism that ignores contingency, on the other hand. But a more accurate understanding of how they relate would require a closer analysis.
 * The logic is the following. If we can find a core of philosophers that all agree on content X, then content X should have a greater weight. The problem arises if you decide from the start that content X is Popper's view or some aspect of Popper's view that you want to emphasize, and so then you choose other philosophers that agree or support your preconceptions while ignoring philosophers who don't. It would be better to find secondary and tertiary sources that describe the main alternative views and how they relate, of whether they can be said to agree about what you want to emphasize. Biogeographist (talk) 12:20, 13 July 2021 (UTC)
 * You wrote: Friedman had an important alternative account of rationality in science and scientific philosophy. Still, my point hold. It's never totally different and when it appears different, it often can be explained by the context. For example, Popper's relation to Duhem-Quine is understood in two different ways in the literature. For Popper, Lakatos and many other philosophers, Popper's falsificationism was established in a robust manner above the Duhem-Quine thesis—it's not challenged by this thesis, while other philosophers still like to view Popper's philosophy as being weakened by the Duhem-Quine thesis. In the extract that you gave, Friedmman explicitly adopt the latter point of view. The explanation for this point of view (not only in Friedman) is most likely that Popper's solution requires that we accept a nonrational part in science: if a philosopher doens't accept this solution because of some a priori, then I can see that instead of seeing Popper's philosophy as a solution to the  Duhem-Quine problem, he still sees this problem as existing in Popper's philosophy.  In any case, in the extract Friedman does not say a word about why he rejects the use of the nonrational part. Instead, he simply refers to the Duhem-Quine thesis to argue that we should reject one interpretation of the hypothetico-deductive account, which he seems to attribute to Popper, but that attribution is not even clear. It's funny, because what is a justification for the nonrational part in Popper's philosophy would be used in Friedman to reject it. So, in order to resolve this conundrum, what I see in this extract is only a rejection of a weak interpretation of the  hypothetico-deductive account that more or less correspond to dogmatic and naive falsificationisms (unfortunately still some times attributed to Popper). I don't see in it a rejection of the existence of non rationality in science. This is an example of what I mean by not looking for superficial contradictions. Here, there is only a contradiction with a weak interpretation of the  hypothetico-deductive account, nothing more, and I am not sure how relevant it is in the context since it ignores the key argument. Dominic Mayers (talk) 14:47, 13 July 2021 (UTC)
 * To sum up, you saw a contradiction in Friedman's extract, but I see in it a support for a rejection of a weak interpretation of the hypothetico-deductive account, a rejection that is also fundamental in Popper's philosophy. My point is that it's way more useful for the readers to focus on what is well established among philosophers than on superficial contradictions that are only due to different interpretations of a same expression or other superficial aspects. After all, they are all great thinkers looking at science, the same history, etc. So, it is to be expected that they mostly see the same thing. In this case, they both reject a weak interpretation of the hypothetico-deductive account. Dominic Mayers (talk) 15:23, 13 July 2021 (UTC)
 * I am happy to agree with this. I am actually very interested in evolutionary epistemology, and I don't see a contradiction between it and historical epistemology, so it would be strained and artificial for me to try to argue that there is such a contradiction. The difference in emphasis is interesting, however. Biogeographist (talk) 16:06, 13 July 2021 (UTC)
 * But then historical epistemology, being consistent with evolutionary epistemology, is a corroboration of it. When some observations (historical or whatever) is consistent with a view, then it's called a corroboration. There is no need at all to adopt a style that suggests that one is an "alternative" view. I don't worry about emphasis on a view as long as it's not presented as an alternative view. If it is presented as a corroboration, then en emphasis on this view is only an emphasis on a corroboration. What I have in mind is that the general theses and arguments for nonrationality in science are (or should be) well covered in other articles and there is no need to cover the details again in an article on empirical evidence. Yet, having this notion of nonrationality in science as a background is useful to avoid doing a POV fork toward a justificationist-inductivist view, which in a way does not really exist. What I mean here by "do not really exist" is that whenever we look deeper in what appears a  justificationist-inductivist view, we can see that in fact, the contradiction is superficial. It has to be, because they all great thinkers. It's our job while writing an article to bring out this coherent synthesis, which is way more useful to readers than superficial contradictions.  Dominic Mayers (talk) 16:41, 13 July 2021 (UTC)
 * But then historical epistemology, being consistent with evolutionary epistemology, is a corroboration of it. When some observations (historical or whatever) is consistent with a view, then it's called a corroboration. There is no need at all to adopt a style that suggests that one is an "alternative" view. I don't worry about emphasis on a view as long as it's not presented as an alternative view. If it is presented as a corroboration, then en emphasis on this view is only an emphasis on a corroboration. What I have in mind is that the general theses and arguments for nonrationality in science are (or should be) well covered in other articles and there is no need to cover the details again in an article on empirical evidence. Yet, having this notion of nonrationality in science as a background is useful to avoid doing a POV fork toward a justificationist-inductivist view, which in a way does not really exist. What I mean here by "do not really exist" is that whenever we look deeper in what appears a  justificationist-inductivist view, we can see that in fact, the contradiction is superficial. It has to be, because they all great thinkers. It's our job while writing an article to bring out this coherent synthesis, which is way more useful to readers than superficial contradictions.  Dominic Mayers (talk) 16:41, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

A meta comment
Every point that we make is likely to contain many sub-points. If one replies to each of these subpoints, each reply is itself a point that can have many sub-points. In this manner, the number of points to be addressed can grow exponentially as we reply to each other. It does not happen in practice, because naturally often we focus on one of the sub-points in the point made or on one of the replies to the sub-points of the point that we previously made. I just want to say that it is what I do often with you: I have to focus on part of your comment and ignore the rest of it, because otherwise it would grow exponentially. You do whatever you want, but I am trying for myself to make one point at a time with as few sub-points as possible and to reply to only one point and even only one sub-point, because in this way I have less chance that many of my points will be rightfully ignored. I don't always succeed to do that, because it's a natural tendency to want to be as thorough as possible, but that tendency is not necessarily a good communication style, because much of what we say in such thoroughly manner is likely to be ignored anyway. Dominic Mayers (talk) 15:55, 13 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Good observations. Biogeographist (talk) 16:06, 13 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I want to add that the other approach as the very significant and important advantage that it forces us to focus on the most crucial sub-point to address and to reduce the number of sub-points that we make to a minimum. In particular, if one the sub-points can stand on its own and is very crucial, perhaps it is wiser to first mention it by itself, because then you avoid that the discussion get loss in the other sub-points that are secondary. Dominic Mayers (talk) 16:13, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

The motivation for this discussion that is not about specific contents and ways to formulate them
A pattern that I see in our discussion is that whenever I emphasize evolutionary epistemology (for its explanation of nonrationality in science) or directly nonrarionality in science, you tend to react by presenting what you call an "alternative view". Yet, once I argue that there is no contradiction, then you seem to always be confortable with it, perhaps because you see an open door to present this "alternative view". I believe that we are still within this pattern and your last agreement with an absence of contradiction is part of it. I mean that if I ever emphasis again the role of non rationality in science, you will again respond by presenting an "alternative view" and we will turn into the same cycle. The cycle can only end if whenever I emphasis nonrationality in science, you see no problem with it and add that we can present other views as complementary to, even corroborating, the role of nonrationality in science. Now, why I have this discussion before entering into the details of the content. The reason is that, if this general approach is understood, it should have a strong influence on details such as the style we use, the choice of terminology, etc. In particular, we might need to be careful with expressions such as "support a theory", because we want to avoid terminology that suggests a contradiction. On the other hand, there might be simpler ways to avoid suggesting a contradiction than simply changing terminology: it can be done in a more direct manner. That's why I want to have an agreement on the general idea before discussing the details of contents and how to formulate them. Dominic Mayers (talk) 17:16, 13 July 2021 (UTC)
 * we might need to be careful with expressions such as "support a theory", because we want to avoid terminology that suggests a contradiction. When everything that is written in the article is properly referenced to a source, I think these kinds of issues are easily resolved. If you think that something is badly stated in the article, then you check the source to see if the source really verifies what is stated. If the text–source integrity is fine, but the source has an inductivist view, then it is important to contextualize that view in relation to criticism of inductivism (from falsificationism and other views), so that the article overall is not biased toward an inductivist view. I am even happy to take an overall approach to the article that assumes that inductivism is wrong, since I am not an inductivist. (But neither do I think that the only learning from experience is negative learning, as Popper may have thought.) However, a danger to be avoided is the misinterpretation that a source is inductivist merely because it talks about "supporting" or "confirming" hypotheses. Mario Bunge, for example, uses these words, but he is not an inductivist. Likewise, not all uses of the term "justification" imply justificationism, which is what I was trying to say about "justification" above: it can simply refer to a set of good reasons, not to reasons purporting to establish absolute certainty. One could easily imagine a similar danger with misinterpreting the words "irrational" or "nonrational". But while I worry about these dangers in theory, in the practice of writing the article these dangers should be easy to overcome. My resistance to your talk of "nonrationality in science" in this discussion is probably due mostly to your lack of sources, so I can't check text–source integrity and evaluate what the sources say. Instead I wonder how you might be wrong.
 * By the way, I will soon be off-wiki for a few days for a planned trip, so don't be alarmed when I disappear. Biogeographist (talk) 20:57, 13 July 2021 (UTC)


 * But neither do I think that the only learning from experience is negative learning, as Popper may have thought. Learning by turning experiences into objective knowledge (i.e. experimental data) and then applying rules to this objective knowledge can only be negative learning. This is not Popper's thesis, but the classical no-induction thesis associated with Hume. This is such a strong thesis that my bet is that most practical "inductivist" views are compatible with a different kind of learning, which involves subjective knowledge in the sense of non-objective (not in the sense of psychological, etc.), as required in the no-induction thesis.  The mistake is to associate "subjective"  with irrational or perhaps even with nonrational. The notion of rationality should be extended to includes the use of subjective knowledge. The philosophers who say that only the practices matter should apply this view to themselves  and realize that saying that these practices use subjective knowledge does not change the practices, but that, on the other hand, rejecting subjective knowledge is rejecting a very natural solution to Hume's problem. Of course, I cannot claim formally that it is the only possible solution. It's natural to consider the actual practices and concretely see that they are not explained by rules on objective knowledge, but even without having considered all the possible practices, I am convinced that it is the case, because otherwise we would have defeated Hume's argument. Some philosophers, including Goodman, advanced that we might found some kind of inductivist rules, i.e., rules on objective knowledge. So, it's not stupid to consider this possibility, but, again, I am convinced that none of the current practices are using such rules. What is possible with objective knowledge alone is very very limited, as much in science as outside science. In science, objective knowledge is very important in all learning process, but Hume's thesis is not against that. It says only that nothing can be learned if we exclude subjective knowledge or, equivalently, nothing we learn is the direct outcome of rules that apply to objective knowledge.  The difference is that objective knowledge and rules on them can still be an important part of the process, which can then be considered rational. I know that it might not be entirely satisfactory, because there is a pejorative connotation associated with subjective or non-objective, but I guess this is where some humility is required in our view of science. Dominic Mayers (talk) 22:53, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

Rfc on Falsifiability
Your comments will be appreciated at Talk:Falsifiability. Dominic Mayers (talk) 19:03, 20 November 2021 (UTC)

Invitation to support the creation of WikiProject Effective altruism
Hello, I've created a proposal for WikiProject Effective altruism to help coordinate efforts to create and articles related to effective altruism. I saw that you made significant improvements to the article Effective altruism, so I thought you might be interested. If you'd like, please support the WikiProject proposal here: WikiProject Council/Proposals/Effective Altruism. —Enervation (talk) 06:37, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

Hoped that I could find qualified people to help on Falsifiability.
I did the RfC in the hope that I will find people that understand the well sourced logical nature of Falsifiability. Except for you maybe, I did not find anyone. I ask myself whether it is useful to work on Falsifiability in this context. It's kind of weird. It's so much there in the sources. Thornton mentions it. Chalmers clearly illustrates it - though he switch the falsificationism after. Of course, Popper insisted so much on this. Watkins and Kuhn referred to it, in a negative manner maybe, but still acknowledging the logical nature of the definition. Kuhn (I paraphrase) said that it has nothing to do with real experiments (as a criticism). When I saw his criticism, I thought well at the least he understood the key point. It's very clear in the sources that it is a logical criterion. Yet, many people refuse that. It's not that they disagree about the way to present this fundamental intrinsic aspect of falsifiability. No, it's because they don't see it as fundamental: the first sentences of the lead could say essentially the opposite and it would be fine for them, as long as the sentences appear somewhere in some other sources. Of course, these sentences exist because Lakatos' falsificationism and the associated confusion has not disappeared from the literature, but we cannot conflate these two views in the article - falsificationism must be presented, but not conflated with falsifiability. Neutrality does not mean conflation of two different concepts. The article is about falsifiability, which is very fundamental and important. Again, if the issue was the approach used to explain this fundamental notion, I would question myself, but it's not that. It's because they don't understand the basic notion of falsifiability. They see it, because it is sourced, but they don't understand the importance of it. I mean, if it's not clear, you cannot even criticize it, like Kuhn did. It's just confusion. It's not what we expect from an encyclopedia. Dominic Mayers (talk) 21:49, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Don't be discouraged by the recent negative comments of the IP editor on the talk page. It is easy to hurl insults without doing any work. If you know of some forum off-wiki where there are likely to be relevant experts, you could post a note there inviting people to review the Wikipedia article. There does not seem to be an active critical rationalist community on Wikipedia. Biogeographist (talk) 15:41, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Want your opinion on making a proposal to delete Theory of knowledge (IB course)
I just saw Theory of knowledge (IB course) and it does not seem to qualify as an encyclopedic article. There is no sources, except from IB and it's only a course description. As far as I am concern, this is a candidate for speedy deletion, despite the fact that it has evaded attention for 2-3 years. Dominic Mayers (talk) 16:45, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
 * I noticed this addition to Epistemology in October. My first impulse was to revert, but I wasn't sure of my rationale, so I let it go. The article has existed since 2005 (first edit), but of course that is no reason not to delete. If you want to nominate it for deletion, I would recommend first doing due diligence and searching for independent reliable sources that may indicate WP:Notability. If you find such sources, then lack of notability is not a valid deletion criterion, and the best you can do is add a cleanup tag like More citations needed. Speedy deletion criterion WP:G11 (Unambiguous advertising or promotion) requires that the article be promotional, which may not the case here. In summary, do some searching for sources first before nominating for deletion. Biogeographist (talk) 17:44, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
 * I found no sources. It's all from the IB or institutions offering the program. There is an article on the International Baccalaureate.  They have an article for each their six departments (called groups) and for special courses, including Theory of Knowledge. There are already More citations needed tags on about half of these articles and I suspect they all need the same tag, just as it is the case for Theory of Knowledge.  The main article International Baccalaureate has one book by Alex Peterson one of the founders with a foreword of Prince Charles.  They have received some recognitions (two or three articles) 15-20 years ago in international publications. It shows that the IB program has some notability. However, this does not justify an article for each department and even for some individual courses. If there is a precedent for this kind of articles in Wikipedia, then I might change my mind, but an article for a course in a curriculum does not seem encyclopedic material at all. This being said, I will not start a procedure. I am afraid the situation would be too political. I already spent too much time on this. It should not be required to start a fight in this kind of situations. Dominic Mayers (talk) 20:02, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Yes, you definitely have better things to do than to deal with this. I clicked around and discovered that there is an even larger group of such pages for the AP courses for high school students in the US, so it could be a hard fight to expunge this kind of article from Wikipedia. Biogeographist (talk) 22:02, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
 * The more I think about it, the less I care about whether or not there are articles of this kind in Wikipedia. It's not what we expect in an ordinary encyclopedia, but I have no problem with Wikipedia being a bit different and these kind of articles seem valid exceptions. However, I care about having clear rules and applying them in a consistent manner. In this particular case, I don't think it is reasonable to expect independent sources for the content of an article about a course in a curriculum. If we, as Wikipedia editors, decide that we accept this kind of articles, then I propose that we adjust accordingly the requirement for sources in these cases. Dominic Mayers (talk) 00:46, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

"Consensus politics" is not a synonym of "Consensus decision-making"
I saw | you added "consensus politics" as a synonym of "consensus decision-making". However, I don't think this synonym is correct. Consensus politics is mentioned nowhere else in the article, I've not come across it in my life, and there are | very few attempted pageviews of it.

I would remove it unless you convince me otherwise. Best, DougInAMug talk
 * I will respond to this at . Biogeographist (talk) 01:38, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

WikiProject Geography
GeogSage (talk) 07:51, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

Design thinking
Hi there, I saw that you deleted and condensed the contributions that I made to the article on design thinking. I appreciate your desire to streamline this information, but I feel that it removed critiques that were not already present in the article (e.g. the relationship of design thinking to consulting). I also think that your placement of the condensed text in the "In business" section of the article is not quite appropriate, since the critiques that I cited involve much more than the business applications of design thinking (e.g. urban planning, higher education...). Happy to discuss more on the talk page for the article and see what others think. Owunsch (talk) 18:12, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
 * I will reply at the article talk page. Biogeographist (talk) 22:01, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Hey, I edited the effective altruism page a bit but I reckon I made errors. I'm sure I could find this information somewhere but I just want to talk to a person.
1 quick question


 * Is it normal to just edit pages or to discuss edits first on the talk page

Nathan PM Young (talk) 17:06, 5 October 2022 (UTC)


 * Both are normal; see WP:BOLD, revert, discuss cycle and for different ways of editing. If I'm coming to an article for the first time, I will check the article history and talk page before editing to see if any edits I'm planning to make have been controversial in the past, and that will help me decide what to do. Biogeographist (talk) 18:52, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

Peer review
I wanted to let you know that I've listed Knowledge for peer review in an attempt to get it to GA status. I found your feedback on my contributions to Knowledge and to Definitions of knowledge quite helpful so I was hoping to hear your ideas on how the article is doing so far and what could be improved. Please don't feel any obligation in case you don't have the time. Phlsph7 (talk) 10:11, 19 October 2022 (UTC)

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SDs
My apologies, I should have considered it more probable that you had already checked the obvious. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 10:21, 12 February 2023 (UTC)

March 2023
Please remember to assume good faith when dealing with other editors, which you did not do on List of important publications in philosophy. ''Please don't call my edits vandalism, especially when I took the time to justify myself on the talk page. You certainly don't need to agree with my justification, and I don't intend to pursue my WP:BOLD edit any further, but you've certainly been here long enough to know better.'' &#32;- car chasm (talk) 17:11, 5 March 2023 (UTC)
 * I carefully said "nearly tantamount to", which is not the same as saying the edit vandalism. An act so bold as removing Plato, Aristotle, and all the early modern philosophers certainly merits the "nearly tantamount to", in my view. If you're going to be that bold, I expect you have a thick enough skin to laugh at such an edit summary instead of taking it personally. As for your justification on the talk page, I found it nonsensical: a list of publications that's not a list of publications? Was that some kind of riddle or joke? Biogeographist (talk) 02:39, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Publications are a word that's typically ascribed in philosophy to journal articles, although the term is occasionally used to refer to all printed material as well. But since the list included Plato and Aristotle, rather than Bekker numbering or Stephanus pagination, it certainly wasn't referring to printed material either. At any rate, most of the works before the 11th century never were "published" by either definition, because printing wasn't invented yet.
 * I'm happy to explain myself further if you feel I've been unclear. If you found my justification on the talk page nonsensical, you could have always asked me about it there.
 * And no, I don't intend to laugh off others accusing me of vandalism for bold edits, especially when they've been here for 10 years. &#32;- car chasm (talk) 03:30, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
 * And no, I don't intend to laugh off: Suit yourself. I explained that there's a difference between what I said and how you chose to interpret it. Your definition of "publications" as journal articles is not one I've encountered.  gives a more typical range of types of publications. Plato and Aristotle have been published for so long now that I don't think it matters that they were once unpublished. Everything that's published starts out as unpublished anyway, except perhaps public real-time chat logs. Biogeographist (talk) 13:22, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Revert on Pragmatism
Thanks for this revert. You may have an emotional reaction of some sort to this list. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 16:24, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

The ref fields
I added the ref fields for a purely technical reason that has nothing to do with the way the Wikipedia engine works. Eventually I want to get rid of bibliographic entries generated by ref tags (whether they are inserted directly in a refs = field or indirectly via footnotes) and directly put these bibliographic entries in alphabetic order in a Bibliography and Further Reading sections. I know that it does not seem to justify these ref fields, but it was only a way I used to allow me to use a program to automatize the process. I worked hard to put these ref fields. They are not lost. They are still in the history. So nothing is lost. Dominic Mayers (talk) 20:57, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
 * OK. That wasn't clear to me. I like alphabetic reference lists too. Thanks, Biogeographist (talk) 02:06, 15 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Of course, there was no way for you to tell. Dominic Mayers (talk) 02:07, 15 June 2023 (UTC)
 * It's not only for the alphabetic order. It is also for the greater flexibility of the sfn abbreviated references. Sometimes, I want to specify the name of the chapter, which can be done with, whereas  after the ref tag takes too much space in the text itself. Even only    takes too much space, I feel. Dominic Mayers (talk) 20:22, 18 June 2023 (UTC)

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February 2024
Please do not add commentary, your own point of view, or your own personal analysis to Wikipedia articles, as you did to Scientific method. Doing so violates Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy and breaches the formal tone expected in an encyclopedia. Thank you. Binksternet (talk) 22:22, 2 February 2024 (UTC)
 * See my response at . Thanks, Biogeographist (talk) 23:26, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Enlightenment
Hello. Your edit over at the What Is Enlightenment? is justified and understandable. So, I replaced that source, with the same source but this goes to a Google Books page where this Chapter four essay can be read by anyone who clicks on it. As I said in my edit summary : "Move from 'Further reading' to be used as a reference...This (source) is speaking to Kant's question as posed in the intro. This is better than the removed source because this is available to anybody."

So, in other words, the problem of verification seems to be solved. Please take a look. If there is a problem with this let me know. I just want to post here to let you know what is going on - to provide some clarity. I appreciate that you removed that source because it was unclear which claim it was supposed to verify.

And, now that we are this point, I might as well say that I removed all the the original research and left only the intro. I affixed those sources to the intro. So, I am not sure how accurate the intro is. As editors we have only so much time to work with this stuff, Hopefully, I can get back to this article at some point. In any case, it is now possible to build an arricle that complies with Wikipedia policies and guidelines. Apologies for such a long post. I did not intend to post this much. Regards, ---Steve Quinn (talk) 02:37, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the note and for your attention to this article. I find it more helpful to put a reference as close to the claim it verifies as possible, instead of placing a bunch of references together at the end of a long paragraph. I still don't know which reference verifies which claim in that paragraph. Your edit summary, when you put back Schmidt 2017 in the lead section, said: "This is speaking to Kant's question as posed in the intro." But the is about Kant's question! If there's not a  claim that Schmidt 2017 verifies, then it should go in "Further reading", in my opinion. In fact, I am the one who first added Schmidt 2017, in this edit in January 2023, after the lead paragraph had been written by somebody else, so I know that it is probably  a reference that was used to write the lead paragraph. So I still don't see a reason for it to be in a ref tag at the end of the lead paragraph. Perhaps I could assent to your move of the reference if you could give me a better reason. Biogeographist (talk) 16:43, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Hi. Thanks for the feedback. I have no problem with putting Schmidt 2017 back into the "Further reading" section. Regards, ---Steve Quinn (talk) 17:12, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

thanks, for formal philosophy book.
I have BA in applied mathematics, I didn't know formal logic cover a whole topic in philosophy. 5.234.36.210 (talk) 12:44, 12 June 2024 (UTC)