English edit

Etymology edit

definientia +‎ -ial/-al

Adjective edit

definiential

  1. (rare) Pertaining to a definiens or to definientia (terms which provide a definition of another term).
    • 1983, Babel, volumes 29-31, page 139:
      Non-human languages, on the other hand, may provide a degree of definiential precision (e.g., water 'H2O', three '3'), but they have extremely limited applicability. Definitions written in a human metalanguage all result in vicious circles, as if  []
    • 1970, Benjamin Boretz, Meta-variations: studies in the foundations of musical thought, part 1, page 13:
      In particular, both Cone [12] and Krenek 123] seem to undervalue the object-language metalanguage distinction in their worry over whether terms introduced with all due definiential care are the "intuitively right" ones, meta-linguistically, for ...
    • 2011, G. A. Damico, On Definitional Unity in Aristotle:
      It is clear enough that Plato influenced Aristotle's theory of definition quite generally, but the problem of definitional, better definiential, unity that Aristotle tackles in two central chapters in the Metaphysics seems to be widely regarded as a purely Aristotelian problem []