descriptionist
English edit
Etymology edit
From description + -ist.
Noun edit
descriptionist (plural descriptionists)
- Synonym of descriptivist
- 1824, The Monthly Repertory of English Literature, page 344:
- The author of the Waverley novels is another fine example; but he clearly takes his highest rank as a descriptionist—the painter of effects and appearances rather than of facts and of causes.
- 1897, Canadian Magazine, volume 8, page 105:
- Although he is a descriptionist, he is often more effective than Roberts or Lampman.
- 1994, Dorothy Ross, Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870-1930, →ISBN, page 134:
- He was, on the other hand, the very opposite of a descriptionist in his physics, especially later in his career.
- 2002, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, volume 122, page 4:
- “Oh,” said one of my lunch companions, “you’re a descriptionist rather than a prescriptionist.”
- (philosophy) One who subscribes to descriptionism.
Related terms edit
Adjective edit
descriptionist (not comparable)
- Descriptivist.
- 2013, William D. Nordhaus, Economics and Policy Issues in Climate Change[1], page 97:
- In effect, they say "a plague on both your houses" to the two sides in the prescriptionist-descriptionist debate.
- (philosophy) Regarding utterances as primarily descriptive rather than as rigidly specifying a particular thing or kind of thing.
- 2015 January 8, Leo Carton Mollica, “Explanation and nowness: an objection to the A-Theory”, in Philosophical Studies, :
- The problem with the descriptionist account of date-times is that it gives the wrong truth conditions to sentences like that in CAESAR.
- (philosophy) Of or relating to descriptionism (theory of truth).