Notability is the property of being worthy of notice, having fame, or being considered to be of a high degree of interest, significance, or distinction. It also refers to the capacity to be such. Persons who are notable due to public responsibility, accomplishments, or, even, mere participation in the celebrity industry are said to have a public profile.
Aesthetic theory
The concept arises in the philosophy of aesthetics regarding aesthetic appraisal. There are criticisms of art galleries determining monetary valuation, or valuation so as to determine what or what not to display, being based on notability of the artist, rather than inherent quality of the art work.
Journalism and marketing
Notability arises in decisions on coverage questions in journalism. Marketers and newspapers may try to create notability to create celebrity, fame, or, or to increase sales, as in the yellow press.
Notables as the privileged class
The privileged class are sometimes called notables, when compared to peasants.
Wikipedia content
Notability of a subject determines which articles will be included or not at Wikipedia. In his book, The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia, Andrew Lih writes that notability is at the center of the debate as to what the world's greatest encyclopedia should be: Emily Artinian compares this passage with Borges' The Library of Babel. Persons wanting to delete an article on the grounds of non-notability are called. Those not wanting to delete the article are called. A team of computer scientists at MIT and Rutgers University has used notability at Wikipedia to create a measure of hierarchy in a directed online social network. The number of hits from a search engine has been proposed as a measure of notability; Wikipedia does not recommend the use of Google's results. The number of citations has been proposed as a measure of notability of a publication or author; the field of study is called citation analysis. Notability may be considered to be ly objective, e.g., inherently as the Big Bang; relatively objectively determinable using a conventional definition, which is subjectively determined by consensus, e.g., an online encyclopedia consensus to consider all towns as being notable, no matter how small; or subjective, such as a notably emotional day for an individual.
Notability in arguments
Notability may be falsely conferred with fallacious reasoning. Name dropping and argument by authority are examples of attempts to confer notability by associating the name of something notable with something else in an attempt to establish notability of that thing. Conferring notability is related to transitivity and the syllogism. If all A's are notable, and x is an A, then x is notable is true by syllogism, but if A is notable, and x is an element of A, then x is not necessarily notable. If x is more notable than y, and y is more notable than z, then x is more notable than z, but if person x considers A to be notable, and A is a subset of B, then x does not necessarily consider B to be notable; an example of an intentional context in the paradox of the name relation.
