[WikiEN-l] Re: Naming convention: popularity vs. correctness

Tue Feb 11 12:14:23 UTC 2003

mav-
> > William of Ockham should reside under that title, as he does, which
> makes
> > the fact that "Occam's" Razor is misspelled even more egregious.
> 
> Hm. You had to mention a specific case. Which academics are you going to
> let 
> decide this one? Many different disciplines lay some claim to the concept
> of 
> Occam's Razor and many of these disciplines use one of two different 
> spellings. Mathematicians and scientists generally use the Latinized
> spelling 
> while most historians use the "Ockham" spelling. Which academics do you
> think 
> are correct? 

I do not think there is any actual disagreement about the spelling of
Ockham's name. Some academics simply use the spelling "Occam's Razor" by
convention; in that, they are no different than other people who use that spelling. The
question we should ask for which title to use is (in this case and others):
Is there any factual disagreement that this name is correct? In this case,
one side says "Look, the guy's name is William of Ockham, not Occam, it's silly
to spell the philosophical concept differently". The other side says "Maybe,
but we've been spelling it Occam for so long, we're not going to change it
now". So we have one historically correct spelling, and one which is somewhat
more popular. It's hard to find a threshold, but unless there's an order of
magnitude of difference in popularity, I think it's proper for us to use (and
redirect to) the correct spelling.

It would be different if the mathematicians said: "No, we also spell William
of Occam that way, because we generally latinize names". Then we should fall
back on popularity because there's an actual controversy about which term is
historically correct. But there isn't.

> In cases where the common name of a subject is misleading (For example: 
> [[Pennsylvania Dutch]] is misleading since it really is a dialect of
> German), 
> then it is sometimes reasonable to fall back on a well-accepted
> alternative 
> ([[Pennsylvania German]], for example). Also, some terms are in common
> usage 
> but are unreasonably offensive to large groups of people (Eskimo, Black 
> American and Mormon Church, for example).. In those cases use widely known
> 
> alternatives (Inuit, African-American, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter
> day 
> Saints, for example).  
> 
> This does not mean that we should avoid using widely-known pseudonyms like
> 
> Mark Twain, Marilyn Monroe, Billy the Kid, or widely-known common names of
> 
> animals and other things. But it does mean that we need to temper common 
> usage when the commonly used term is unreasonably misleading or offensive
> to 
> one or more groups of people.
> 

I could accept that rephrasing.

> PS I just did a spell check and "Ockham" came up as a misspelling but
> "Occam" 
> did not.

Bad spellchecker. See http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=occam

Regards,

Erik

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