presentationism

English

Etymology

From presentation +‎ -ism.

Noun

presentationism (uncountable)

1. (philosophy) The doctrine that the mind is capable of grasping the substance and reality of objects, beyond the sensory stimuli they present.
   • 1866, The British Controversialist and Literary Magazine, page 60:

     If presentationism is wrong, is not "science falsely so called" — can it be knowledge, can it give truth? Mr. Stirling does not afford us any clue, in this work, as to how he would reconcile the assumption of presentationism by science so fertile in results with the denial through philososophy ^[sic] of the possibility of anything else than phenomenal experience.

   • 1904, Richard Burdon Haldane Haldane (Viscount), The Criticism of Categories (page 48)

     Presentationism, the seizing upon feeling and by a sort of abstraction converting it into a self-subsisting phenomenon divorced from the movement of reflection which gives it its meaning.

Related terms

• presentationist