Category talk:Theories

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This category was nominated for deletion, renaming, or merging with another category on 2007 August 16. The result of the discussion was no consensus / withdrawn.

[edit] size

Is there not supposed to be the big shrink? 74.237.29.31 02:10, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

What the use of such broad category? Chemistry theories must be under Chemistry, psychological theories under Psychology. When you are, for example, physicist, you are not interested in Conspiracy theories. I think this category must be deleted. Orionus 08:41, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

I've added {{catdiffuse}} so that articles are diffused into appropriate subcategories. 132.205.44.5 04:33, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The purpose of this category

Some participants in the deletion discussion seem to know what this category is good for. Unfortunately they forgot to write an introduction, so I had to do it based on its current contents:

This category is intended to contain all other categories and articles which carry the word "theory" in their name or are vaguely related to theories.

I am sure those who feel responsible for the category can improve this text. --Hans Adler (talk) 16:53, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Biology theories

Are there no biology theories? There are physics, chemistry, geology, psychology and sociology here, why no biology? Isn't evolution a theory? biogenesis? Hardy-Weinberg, there are many.Tstrobaugh (talk) 19:30, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Actually, I think the main problem with this category is that nobody is really interested in it, nobody knows what kind of articles it is supposed to contain, or how it is supposed to be used. Mathematics has numerous branches, listed as subcategories of Category:Mathematics. Some of them have the word "theory" in their name, which is just an accident of language. These, and no others, appear as subcategories here. It looks like a borderline case of Wikipedia:Overcategorization#Unrelated subjects with shared names. I would like to fix this problem, but so long as nobody bothers to make the category description a bit more precise I don't know what to do.

I am beginning to suspect that (apart from overcategorisers) the category is wanted mainly by creationists and similar people who like to tag certain articles as "theories" in order to support the often repeated equivocation that evolution is a theory and therefore we can't really know if it is a fact. And perhaps by a certain type of people who think they are sociologists and like to talk about things they don't understand.

One problem is that the definition and status of "theories" is certainly subject dependent. I don't know if biologists use the word in the same way as mathematicians. If they did, I would expect to see the "theory of cells", the "theory of animals", the "theory of birds", the "theory of plant roots" and so on within your new subcategory. Basically all of biology. Is there any particular reason why you haven't included them? What's special about the fields you have included? --Hans Adler (talk) 22:23, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

"theory of cells" is listed under "Cell Theory". I don't know what "theory of birds" or "theory of roots" are but if you find them go ahead and categorize them. The only thing the categories I tagged have in common is that I am aware of them. Feel free to add more. I was actually thinking of linking the "theory" in some way with the "experiment" as in Category:Science experiments. There are biology, chemistry, physics and psychology experiments listed. Perhaps you can tell me if the field you are an expert in (math?) uses the words "theory" and "experiment" in the ways defined in Scientific method? I know that is how they are used in biology and psychology. If you think I have a bias see my user page, I edit biology and psychology because I have degrees in them and am a member of their respective wikipedia projects.Tstrobaugh (talk) 14:56, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

I must admit that I had already checked your user page, based on the odd coincidence of the pages you are interested in. (Coincidence because my thoughts on this category predate your edits.) The result was so obvious that I was a bit negligent and didn't make it clear enough I wasn't suspecting you.

Mathematics is somewhat special in that we have (more or less) absolute truths and it doesn't seem to make much sense to apply terminology from the scientific method to this as if it was a science. "Experiments" in mathematics usually amount to trying to verify theorems that we suspect to hold in a finite number of special cases. Some of the stuff in the Collatz conjecture article is the closest analogue to scientific experiments in the usual sense that I know of. For us, "the theory of X" is just a large body of results about X which more or less fit together. Either most of mathematics seems to belong into the "theory" category or practically none of it, depending on the exact definition of the category. There is even a paragraph Scientific method#Relationship with mathematics, but it's not clear to me how it helps.

To take a specific example from biology, I have the impression that the article on rooss is mainly about their basic "theory"; perhaps everything except the "economic importance" section. Would you agree with that, or is there an aspect of a "theory" that is missing here? And what uses do you see for this category? Why would someone want to navigate through all the theory articles and skip the others? --Hans Adler (talk) 18:37, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

roos is a bad link or I don't understand it. Can't comment. I made it clear that "theory" and "experiment" are related by the scientific method. Which is a subcategory of Philosophy of Science, which is a subcategory of Philosophy (of which maths are also a branch). No one has to skip any categories, just organizing the way I see the world.Tstrobaugh (talk) 19:53, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Sorry for the silly typo, I don't know how this happened. I meant roots. — I don't think we have clear rules for when (not) to create categories, but I have often heard that it is typically as a navigational aid. I thought you might have evidence that it's actually useful in this way, which could have kept me from proposing this category for deletion once more. --Hans Adler (talk) 20:27, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

If you can't see how I just laid out the strategy of navigation, from philosophy down to theory and experiment I don't know what else I can say.Tstrobaugh (talk) 20:58, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

It's not that I would insist on deleting this category. I just want to solve the ridiculous treatment of mathematics that we have here, and since I still don't understand its intended purpose, deleting it altogether seems to be one of the options for the inconsistent treatment of mathematics. (Model theory, number theory, proof theory, set theory, obstruction theory appear as subcategories, and algebra, analysis, functional analysis, topology, geometry do not. This makes no sense whatsoever since the distinguishing feature seems to be the name only.) I am not much wiser than I was before, but at least now I have a slight preference for one of the three obvious solutions to this inconsistency: Removing all mathematical "theories" from this category, as they are probably not "theories" in the sense of the scientific method. However, I suspect that even the sciences have similar problems; that's why I was interested in the root example. --Hans Adler (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 21:23, 18 January 2008 (UTC)