[WikiEN-l] fictional categories

[Ian Woollard]

Schroedinger's cat very definitely is fictitious; it's not an
experiment you can actually do and get an alive/dead cat that you can
actually see, you would get either an alive cat, or a dead cat.

The Higgs boson is supposed to be a *real* particle; it is not
fictitious, it is hypothetical, it's believed to exist, and there's an
experiment under way to attempt to find it.

Thought experiments can be about fictitious items or real items, just
because it's in a thought experiment doesn't make it fictitious or
not.

On 04/11/2009, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Surreptitiousness <
> surreptitious.wikipedian at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> David Goodman wrote:
>> > Fiction is a very broad term. fictions can be used for rhetorical
>> > purposes in serious discourse--fictional examples are a mainstay of
>> > philosophical argument, dating back to Plato's cave, if not earlier.
>> >
>> > For this hypothetical animal, I do not think there will be any
>> > difficulty finding a citation that says that it is a fiction.
>> >
>> >
>> The point I am making is more that this is a dangerous path we are on.
>> I would have no difficulty providing a source that Santa Claus or God
>> etc are a fiction.  However, given that Schrödinger's cat is categorised
>> in Category:Thought experiments, what does Category:Fictional cats add
>> to the article, and should string theory or string (physics) therefore
>> be categorised in Category:Fictional science?  I think we need to be
>> very careful what we categorise when it comes to fiction, and what we
>> are mixing up in our categories which categorise things which are
>> fictive and things which are theoretical. Schrödinger's cat does not
>> exist in a work of fiction, it exists, as you say, in a theroetical
>> argument, which is different from a work of fiction. Another good
>> example is Higgs bosun, or whatever it is that big collider can't find.
>> Mind you, I notice The Lady, or the Tiger? is in Category:Fictional
>> tigers, although not in Category:Fictional females, which implies there
>> are even more flaws in the system.Especially when The Monkey and the
>> Hunter avoids both Category:Fictional monkeys and Category:Fictional
>> hunters.  Hope I've better outlined the issue as I see it.
>>
>>
> I think you make a persuasive argument that Schroedinger's Cat should not be
> in Category:Fictional cats. Therefore, I advise you to remove that category
> from the article.
>
> There isn't much else to say about this besides {{sofixit}}.
>
> - causa sui
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


-- 
-Ian Woollard