Philosophical Research:Items

Items are identifiable concepts distinguishable from other concepts. The scope of what an Item can contain is rather broad, extending to almost anything somebody can hold up a real-world object as an example of — if something can be referenced on a particular page of a book, it has almost certainly met the baseline criteria to be an Item. In the general sense, "items" (wikibase-item) are simply a data-coding tool used to give concepts numbers and link the numbers to each other. In the specific sense, this Wikibase distinguishes between general-category Items, usually representing real-world objects or processes, and a subcategory of items called Signifiers, usually representing images or terms appearing inside works.

Here, Items have a relatively lax notability requirement. Almost anything is considered notable, as long as that thing could conceivably be analyzed in an academic journal article or serves as evidence that it is part of a coherent concept and a more generalized version of it could. If something has enough bibliographic information to be cited, it is notable. Scientific models are notable. Philosophical models are notable. Fictional characters or events are notable. Arbitrary literary motifs and quotes are considered notable, although these last three things belong in the Signifier namespace.

One of the few potential exceptions to what is notable is arbitrary real-world individuals, or published works which amount to arbitrary daily activities of arbitrary individuals. Items should avoid encroaching onto topics that could connect to or perhaps spawn personal "drama" between specific individuals, or which could expose arbitrary individuals to harassment or real-world attacks. The first rule of thumb is that in order to include a work some minimum amount of publication must occur which makes it widely available to anybody even if it is not necessarily available to everybody, and it should be available for approximately a year or two, counting the time it is available and in discussion through online dead-webpage archives. The second general rule of thumb is that all works are subject to death of the author, and authors are non-notable on pure grounds of having created a work, unless something else about them becomes notable, as might be evidenced by a news story, or the need to create an author Item purely to connect related works and fill in localized names or links to biography articles. This Wikibase is, in general, not intended to be a database of detailed information on authors or publishing entities, as such information is already much better handled by Wikidata. However, for citation purposes, some such Items that "shouldn't" be notable can still be created to group other Items, and linked to their Wikidata counterpart.

Occasionally, you may see the rules of notability bent for unpublished work by R.D. or vidak. This is a unique exception granted due to the great amount of time and effort required to create these works and the need to collect great numbers of anecdotal and academic references that are to be connected to small or large portions of them, which was one of the primary reasons for founding this ontology project. This can be considered the "thesis rule": if you have been recognized as working on a long and difficult thesis-length work or theoretical project of comparable scope, you might get permission to term any unpublished article or scrap that at least somewhat supports the work "notable". In either case, "thesis" pages documenting these unpublished works are generally kept under user pages (User:), and considered adjacent to the main content of the wiki.

Basic Items (Z / Z1)

Basic Items are Items referring to non-fictional concepts with little room for ideological interpretation or controversy. Most basic Items should refer to material objects or processes, and should be given especially easy-to-understand primary labels.

Signifier Items (S / S1)

Signifiers are spoken, written, or visual chunks of communication which are assigned particular meanings by particular individuals or groups.

For the purposes of analyzing art, signifiers may manifest as repeated images, repeated dialogue phrases, references to prior works, analogies, metaphors, literary motifs, or any general arbitrary association of one thing to another which specifically exists internal to one particular work or series. Here, the concept of signifiers has been stretched to its absolute limit such that characters, systems of fictional physics, and any number of things which are taken as literal within their respective works can be considered signifiers — for instance, Sonic the Hedgehog is considered a signifier for the purposes of contrasting the internal definition of Sonic the Hedgehog to other characters in platforming games or dramatically-inclined adventure stories. The Signifier-items for Shadow the Hedgehog (Sonic metaseries) and Vegeta IV (Dragon Ball metaseries) discuss each other in order to uncover the intentional and unintentional narrative parallels between these characters. At the same time, a character entry can also link to real-world concepts that it illustrates. If, for instance, Sonic and Tails were used in some particular text to illustrate the concept that individuals are not interchangeable, the Signifiers for each character would link to concepts such as "individual", "relativity", or "replacing Tails with Sonic", while the lattermost of these Signifiers, "replacing Tails with Sonic", would also link itself back to Sonic and Tails to represent how it directly references these previous images. This is the overall purpose of Signifier-items: to draw parallels between interconnected systems of objects or significances in fiction (cultural symbolism constellations, ontologies, or Facticities) and interconnected systems of objects and processes in reality, as well as other interconnected systems in fiction.

For the purposes of analyzing philosophies, signifiers may take the form of jargon terms, ordinary words employed in recognizable but highly-specific usages, repeated quotes from older texts, repeated in-text citations or prior work titles, or images with controversial meanings across different philosophies. For instance, "Stalin's government" could be considered a signifier because within the broad field of Marxist discourse Trotskyists and Stalin followers interpret the significance of the image differently and attach different underlying models of real-world function to it. If it happens that these models are so drastically different they hardly even resemble each other, the Signifier-item is best divided into two separate Signifiers, such as "Stalin's government (Trotskyism)" and "Stalin's government (Stalin Thought)". Using this method of combining relatively-ordinary or widespread usages and disambiguating tags, controversies can be exposed which are normally invisible within the bounds of particular philosophies. It can be argued that projects such as Wikipedia suffer from the inability to package themselves in localized, biased language familiar to real-world readers, who may look at the neutral framings of Wikipedia, regard them as foreign to their particular philosophy and experience, and reject the whole project as "biased" or "improperly infiltrated by mainstream thought". However, if a project instead decides to forego pretending that neutrality through a single point of view is possible and simply express itself in several different biased framings at once, it becomes easier to illuminate the differences between various different biased ideologies and the relationship of each ideology to material reality and what is most likely to be true.

This wikibase has a habit of favoring grouping together similar signifiers into a single item when their ranges of usage and meaning come close to being indistinguishable. This is to encourage a somewhat-more-efficient ontology, in which things with the same relationship to a particular thing are easily connected with the same things, and the focus can shift beyond specific instances of concepts to overall connections. It is also easier to correct mistakes made by lumping two items together than those made by creating two separate items. However, if there is any serious doubt about whether two images most likely refer to different things, they should be different Signifiers.

Metaphysical category Items

S0 Signifiers

S0 Signifiers are Items referring to concepts that are both non-fictional and abstract. Taking a concept such as "philosophy" or "mathematical variable letter", these terms should in theory be arbitrary symbolic imagery that could be assigned any definition, but they have come to have standardized and consistent meanings, at least to the point of there not being much difficulty objectively determining whether another concept is or is not contained within it.

Hypothesis Items

S2 statements

S2 Items are hypothesis statements tying together S1 Signifiers or Z1 Items into a claimed model of how they are related. An S2 Item is considered a Signifier in that the truth value or accuracy of the statement is not necessarily known, and thus the statement may be assigned different meanings by different people.

Z2 statements

Z2 Items are a tentative new category for hypothesis statements which are solidly substantiated in the manner of Z1 items. A Z2 Item may contain, for instance, Z1 items representing material objects tied together in a relationship representing a well-tested scientific equation.

F2 statements

F2 Items are a tentative new category for hypothesis statements which are either long unsubstantiated or refuted. With respect to scientific hypotheses, an F2 statement Item may represent a model which is falsified and does not predict experimental results. With respect to defined fictional universes, an F2 statement Item may represent a fan theory which has solidly been shown to be inconsistent with established information, and which purely exists in the sphere of fanmade retroactive continuity.

List of Items

The namespace to hold Items is currently under construction.

See User:Reversedragon/FirstNineThousand.