polypragmatism

English

Etymology

poly- +‎ pragmatism

Noun

polypragmatism (countable and uncountable, plural polypragmatisms)

1. (medicine) The approach of trying various possible therapeutic treatments with no clear diagnostic guide.
   • 1933, Heinrich Franz Wolf, Textbook of Physical Therapy, page xi:

     Why interfere with a self-limited condition unless some unusual feature, a danger sign, makes its appearance? Polypragmatism was always ridiculous. Is it not polypragmatism if we do something useless, unnecessary, uncalled for?

   • 2008, Klaus Bergdolt, Wellbeing: A Cultural History of Healthy Living, →ISBN, page 92:

     In the later imperial age, medical polypragmatism seems to have been the order of the day. The most diverse remedies were administered, not least because, as Galen himself admitted, 'the people demand medication'.

   • 2012, Roger Denio Baker, O.A. Angulo, C. Barroso-Tobila, The Pathologic Anatomy of Mycoses, →ISBN:

     The pressure on the physician to provide therapy and the unquestionable need for treatment have led to certain polypragmatisms.

   • 2017, Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, →ISBN:

     Faced with wheezing, blue-faced patients, they felt they had to do something, and the approach they adopted was polypragmatism, or polypharmacy: they threw the medicine cabinet at the problem.

2. (more generally) The use of multiple approaches to a single issue.
   • 1907, George Saintsbury, The Later 19th Century, page 327:

     It would appear, on the whole, that the country is going through a very natural transition-period after the blossoming-time from Bellman to Runeberg, and that the present or recent literary activity is mainly on the surface, and of no particular importance. Perhaps this might be said of the parallel movements in more countries than one, or two, or three. 'Even the literary polypragmatism of Strindberg, as of other contemporary writers, is a “sign.

   • 1908, George Saintsbury -, A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day, page 267:

     Epic, tragedy, lyric, satire, epigram itself— Martial has tried them all and dropped them, because he feels himself beaten by Tucca. This is not fair; let Tucca leave him at least one kind, the kind that he doesn't care for. It is not fanciful, surely, to find a critique of poetical polypragmatism here also.

   • 1967, Islamic Review - Volumes 55-56, page 7:

     As to the monotheistic attitude of Alkmaeon, this is not very surprising, for he was a Pythagoreon, also a mystic with pantheistic tendencies, adhering firmly to the oneness of the whole existence and was known as a bitter and avowed enemy of polytheism and polypragmatism — the belief that nature has various creative forces.

3. The application of a single approach or solution to multiple problems.
   • 1983, George Ernest Wright, The Biblical Archaeologist - Volume 46, page 35:

     Its prima facie presence can be immediately grasped in the controlled critical judgments of a Polybius or a Plutarch or a Sophocles attempting to penetrate to the causes of the most dense phenomenon, human polypragmatism. It is present in equal measure in Demosthenes' oration, "On the Crown," and in the Roman Pantheon, where the syntax of word and stone is stretched into ever larger and more complex architectonic units with such ease and skill and daring that the spectator can move effortlessly from part to whole and back again without either moral or aesthetic vertigo.

   • 2016, Nicholas de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, →ISBN:

     The manifold practical applications of mensuration, furthermore, is the very theme of works by Worsop, Digges, Dee and so on - the polypragmatism of mathematics.

4. A tendency toward meddling or officiousness.
   • 1907, The Living Age - Volume 252, page 707:

     Further, Balzac's polypragmatism on the one hand, and that tendency to careful and official preservation of all business documents which the French have inherited from their Roman lords on the other, made it pretty certain that fresh matter would turn up.

   • 1944, American Bookman: A Quarterly of Literary Theory:

     The curse of polypragmatism that brought modern mass misery has never been more keenly pointed out than by a great man who stood at the very cradle of the bourgeois era, Blaise Pascal. In his thoughts on "Human Misery" he writes: "The most intolerable punishment for the human soul is to live with itself and think of itself. For that reason the soul is constantly concerned with the effort to forget itself, by occupying itself with all manner of things that prevent introspection..."

   • 1959, Wilhelm Röpke, International Order and Economic Integration, →ISBN, page 218:

     Any objective explanation of the logic of this term as undertaken, for instance, by F. MACHLUP in his essay, 'Three Concepts of the Balance of Payments and the so-called Dollar Shortage' (Economic Journal, March 1950), is usually received very testily by the exponents of a collectivist and inflationary avant-gardism, firstly, because they object to the proof that the balance of payments rights itself without the polypragmatism of economic planning if only the opposite of their beloved policy is pursued, and secondly because they are bitterly opposed to the proof that their own policy is responsible for the 'adverse balance of payments'.