Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Actual infinity


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   keep. postdlf (talk) 19:37, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

Actual infinity

 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

The topic of this article is not entirely clear to me, but if it's about anything at all, it's about infinity, which already has an article. This article also appears to present a rather different POV from the infinity article.  N Y  Kevin   19:15, 31 August 2013 (UTC)


 * The article seems fine to me, though I am not totally familiar with Wikipedia's deletion policies. I see this article as discussing a more philosophical aspect of the infinite. Additionally, indeed there are debates about the potential-actual distinction, but the entry has citations for sources. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.63.125.64 (talk) 19:37, 31 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. Northamerica1000(talk) 21:02, 31 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions. Northamerica1000(talk) 21:02, 31 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Keep Valid topic and not a POV fork, since infinity is about the concept of infinity in mathematics, whereas this article is about the concept of infinity in the philosophy of mathematics. Notable topic and well sourced, although references could be tidied up. Gandalf61 (talk) 15:32, 1 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Keep As the article points out, this topic goes back at least to Aristotle. It's one that philosophers and philosophically inclined people write about.  It is about a different idea from the various ideas of infinity used in mathematics. Michael Hardy (talk) 15:49, 1 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Speedy keep. The distinction between potential and actual infinity is important philosophically and notable encyclopedically. E.g. Google scholar has 2700+ hits for the subject phrase and Google books has 12000+. "I don't understand it" isn't a valid deletion rationale. I disagree with Hardy's claim that this idea isn't used in pure mathematics: ordinals and cardinals are actual infinities, but the infinity symbol used in sums and limits is generally a potential infinity. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:16, 1 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Nominator comment Everyone says there's a distinction, but no such distinction is discussed in the article in more than vague, high-level terms.  If such a distinction really exists, go add it; don't just tell me there is one.  -- N  Y  Kevin   20:43, 1 September 2013 (UTC)
 * (after edit conflict} You seem to be reading a different article from the one that I can see, as the latter certainly does discuss the distinction. Admittedly it does so in an inadequate manner but that is a reason to improve the article by editing, not to delete it. I've made a start by deleting a vacuous section sourced to a "forthcoming" paper. Phil Bridger (talk) 21:03, 1 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm not convinced of that. The article doesn't just look like a POV fork.  It openly proclaims itself to be one.  A rebuttal to that section, perhaps involving some sort of nonconstructively infinite object, would help, but I'm unconvinced the sources required to write such a rebuttal actually exist.  -- N  Y  Kevin   17:12, 2 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I don't understand what you think needs to be rebutted. That section describes some viewpoints but doesn't describe any of them as correct because there is no general agreement, certainly at the philosophical level, about what is correct. Most mathematicians make pragmatic use of the concept of actual infinity because its acceptance leads to interesting and useful mathematics, but at the same time most mathematicians would accept that that is something different from accepting that actual infinity exists in the "real" world. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:47, 2 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I'd like to hear more about why the Phil Bridger considered the section at the end 'vacuous'. The paper has a source and discusses the potential-actual infinite distinction. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.190.168.50 (talk) 15:44, 3 September 2013 (UTC)
 * The only source for that section was a forthcoming paper, with no evidence that the content is important enough in the context of thousands of years of discussion of actual infinity to merit a section in our article. We base our content on published material, and select our balance of content within an article on the basis of how much it is discussed by reliable published sources. Besides that it was written in a conversational instructive style rather than being descriptive of this concept, rendering it empty of any encyclopedic content, i.e. vacuous. Wikipedia is not a place to promote your forthcoming papers. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:49, 3 September 2013 (UTC)
 * That is helpful, if perhaps overly presumptive.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.190.168.50 (talk) 18:08, 3 September 2013 (UTC)
 * A POV fork is an article that takes a minority opinion on the same subject as the main article that it is a fork of. This article is on a specialized subtopic of the theory of infinity (the philosophical divide between actual and potential) and covers multiple opinions on that one issue, which is not the subject of any other article. It is not a POV fork, no more than (to pick a random example from your recent editing) macro photography is a POV fork of photography. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:02, 3 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Keep. The topic is a genuine point of philosophical/mathematical debate. This is clearly demonstrated in several references used. The size of the article is large enough to justify its own page, and the "Infinity" article is already quite big. Axl  ¤  [Talk]  08:56, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.