Talk:Arbitrariness

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Hi it's the REcreator ( ? :D) of this article once again.. I was just thinking that some readers might find the ref. to ayn rand and objectivism, as well as some other things about this article, not healthy in terms of keeping neutral... NPOV I believe it's called on here. I think it's a good start for an article, and it begs contributions from the other wikipedians, and myself... I intend to work on it some more if you folks see to it thats it is a legitimate subject for a wp article. ;) I love WP... I take it that creating articles for the "wiktionary" as well as some of the other things I've heard about on here are fairly similar? something about a "mediawiki", no?

Hey listen up!!! I just re-recreated this article, and I would encourage people to contrubute to it. "Arbitrary" is a fascinating and worthwhile subject, and IMHO deserves its own page here on wikipedia.:D - Black Lab

Hi, this is basejumper123 and this article can be deleted. I wrote it to fill a non-functional link, but it really should be in wiktionary

Agreed. But I think there might be a link to or explanation of 'arbitrary' in terms of semiotics (Sign (semiotics)). There is much discussion about arbitrariness there and this can have some relevance. -- Aethralis 08:40, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

HI: This is a good article to keep but the main entry does not match the (correct) definition(s) in Wictionary. The most general sense of the term is given in definition 1: "Based on individual discretion or judgement". The examples given here in paragraph 2 (buying gas by licence plate numbers and sorting people by surname) are arbitrary in the sense that there are a number of options and only one was chosen. The choice is not made without "any underlying principle or logic" or "by whim or some decidedly illogical formula"; the choice was made because one option had to be taken and that choice was made by "individual discretion or judgement". This is what scientists and academics do all the time in creating models/theories. If the current article is specifically a philosopher's understanding of the term then this should be made clear at the top.(Eco ant (talk) 22:01, 24 June 2009 (UTC))

NPOV

As per Talk:Ayn Rand#Rand is not a philosopher, I have placed a NPOV warning on the article because it asserts that Rand is a philosopher. -- LGagnon 01:05, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

It should be noted that LGagnon went on his crusade before actually getting a consensus. Multiple passerby including myself disagreed with him that any reference to Rand as a philosopher is somehow wrong, and nobody joined LGagnon's side. Since there doesn't seem to be an actual dispute, I removed the tag. SnowFire 01:54, 21 August 2006 (UTC)