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 delete. postdlf (talk) 04:47, 27 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Named set

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Removed ((prod)). Reason there was: "Appears to be nonsense: extremely vague, grandiose claims, unrelated references, lack of reputable sources, lack of citations, etc." I agree with all but "appears to be nonsense". I would add that the difficulty in categorizing the article might be an indication that the subject doesn't exist. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 14:57, 20 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. Northamerica1000^(talk) 15:45, 20 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Delete, hopefully speedy I have no idea what this article is saying. For example, we have the following from the article: "According to Irlam (1995), everything is a naming problem. This implies that names are everywhere and thus, named sets are also everywhere because names exist only in the context of named sets as a name names something or somebody." How's that again?William Jockusch (talk) 02:30, 21 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. This appears to be primarily a promotional vehicle for some of the work of M. Burgin, better known for fringy work claiming that Zeno's paradox is somehow a refutation of the Church–Turing thesis (see super-recursive algorithm — note that, unlike the nominated article, this work is clearly notable, but still in my opinion flaky). His "Theory of named sets as a foundational basis for mathematics" has 23 citations in Google scholar, but most of them turn out to be self-citations. As near as I can tell, this is about functions (or possibly more specifically injective functions, I can't tell) dressed up in fancy new names: "support" for "domain", etc. (Note that in standard mathematical usage the support of a function is something different, the subset of the domain in which it is nonzero). What this needs, to make a real encyclopedia article, is a reliable source by someone independent of Burgin clearly describing what new thing this work brings to the table. In the absence of such a source, we don't have a basis for writing an article and in any case I'm skeptical that this passes WP:GNG. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:11, 21 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Delete, speedy. Disclosure: I added the deletion tag to the page. I agree with several of the sentiments expressed so far. The topic of the article appears to be fringe work. It's hard to tell what exactly the theory is about and at least whatever is decipherable from the cited sources doesn't pass the notability criterion. The sources that are presented as Foundations work don't offer new technical insight or offer any clear and unique formal machinery for solving problems or understanding existing problems in novel ways. The lack of rigorous definitions, lemmas, theorems, and other standards of mathematical exposition are problematic. As far as I can tell, most of the material in these sources merely attempts to show (in, at best, a questionable fashion) that almost all mathematical objects are either "named sets" or are closely related to "named sets". The "I've found a new theory underlying everything but that doesn't actually do anything" is usually a sign of nonsense and pseudoscience. There's room for work on naming and related issues and this has been explored fruitfully even in contemporary times by logicians and computer scientists working in the areas of foundations, logical frameworks, and metatheory of formal languages. There's also room for philosophy in mathematics, which has seen a bit of a revival recently with recent developments in category theory and type theory. Unfortunately, this "named sets" material does not seem to offer technical insights into naming or qualify as serious philosophy by any standard I am aware of. 174.126.108.52 (talk) 23:29, 21 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. Obvious pseudoscientific twaddle. Sławomir Biały (talk) 12:44, 22 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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.