Word Finder - criterion

definition

A standard or test by which individual things or people may be compared and judged.

example

Criterion of choice, of decision, of selection

Feeling, therefore, is the only possible criterion alike of knowledge and of conduct.

It is important to understand clearly the criterion which he applied; it is frequently misapprehended.

The church lays down a rule of domestic policy, and neither gives nor pretends to give any absolute criterion for the validity of ordination.

Reason is the ultimate criterion.

But, as society exists only for the proper development of persons, we have a criterion by which to test these institutions, viz.

Starting from the two Socratic principles of virtue and happiness, he emphasized the second, and made pleasure the criterion of life.

There is a very definite criterion of the simplicity due to degeneration, which can in most cases be applied.

Watches that meet this criterion are deemed Shock Resistant.

A practical theory of ethics seeks to establish a particular moral ideal; if it is an absolute criterion, then the altruist would place first the attainment of that ideal by others, while the egoist would seek it for himself.

Granted that rationality taken in the sense of inner coherence and self-consistency is the ultimate standard of truth and reality, does self-consciousness itself answer to the demands of this criterion?

Hence the name Rosmini gives it of ideal being; and this he laid down as the fundamental principle of all philosophy and the supreme criterion of truth and certainty.

Oriental law is primitive or advanced according to the social conditions, with the result that antiquity of ideas is no criterion of date, and modern desert custom is more archaic than the great code of the Babylonian king Khammurabi Babylonian g y g Law.

The criterion which guided the studies of the academicians was far from being worthy of unqualified praise, and consequently their work did not always meet the approval of the best scholars who had the opportunity of seeing the monuments.

Neither criterion is a guarantee that the star shall have a measurable parallax.

To say, however, that Clarke simply confused mathematics and morals by justifying the moral criterion on a mathematical basis is a mistake.

Less familiar to modern ears is the contention that proof needs a standard or criterion, while this standard or criterion in turn needs proof.

Guided by this objective criterion, and safeguarded by growing insight into the author's plastic aim, we need not despair of reaching large agreement as to the nature of the sources lying behind the first half of Acts.

The Evidences of Christianity is mainly a condensation of Bishop Douglas's Criterion and Lardner's Credibility of the Gospel History.

A general criterion for the case of a rigid body movable in two dimensions, with one degree of freedom, can be obtained as follows.

We have seen that the stresses produced by an equilibrating system of extraneous forces in a frame which is just rigid, according to the criterion of 6, are in general uniquely determinate; in particular, when there are no extraneous forces the bars are in general free from stress.

He took up the greatest happiness principle not as an attractive philosopheme, but as a criterion to distinguish good laws from bad.

Sir John Bowring tells us that when Bentham was casting about for such a criterion " he met with Hume's Essays and found in them what he sought.

It is commonly said that in making this distinction Mill has practically given up utilitarianism, because he has applied to pleasure (alleged to be the supreme criterion) a further criterion which is not pleasure.

When boiled in water the root affords a dark extractive matter, the quantity of extract yielded by the root being used as a criterion of its quality.

It is necessary, therefore, that assent should not be given indiscriminately; we must determine a criterion of truth, a special formal test whereby reason may recognize the merely plausible and hold fast the true.

Thus it shows that the "primitive" features of Genesis afford a criterion which is sociological rather than chronological.

Applications for this award are very competitive, and are judged on one criterion; the candidate's outstanding academic ability and research potential.

To Plato and Aristotle the nature and operation of thought and reason constitute a sufficient criterion.

The law which regulates our action is thus the ultimate criterion of what we know - practical knowledge being understood to be of paramount importance.

The same criterion was available for knowledge derived more directly from the intellect.

All the assaults of the sceptical Academy had failed, and within fifty years of the death of Carneades his degenerate successors, unable to hold their ground on the question of the criterion, had capitulated to the enemy.

The only certain criterion of a medusa-individual is the presence of definite sense-organs, but in cases where the organism is much reduced, this criterion may fail us, as it does in the genus Lucernaria.

It is a purely formal direction, and as such merely an adjunct to a substantive ethical criterion.

Stature is by no means a general criterion of race, and it would not, for instance, be difficult to choose groups of Englishmen, Kaffirs, and North American Indians, whose mean height should hardly differ.

All eclecticism that is not self-condemned and inoperative implies a system of doctrine as its basis, - in fact, a criterion of truth.

The answer is in substance that Kant went wrong in putting necessity first as the criterion of those laws.

As Spiegel remarks (Die arische Periode, p. 105), though it is easy enough to connect the word with a root ar-, there are several roots of that form which have different meanings, and there is no certain criterion whereby to decide to which of them it is related.

This predisposed him to regard physical miracles as the solid criterion for distinguishing reasonable religious conviction from " inclinations, fancies and strong assurances."

But when such criticism passes into the attempt to find a universal criterion of morality - such an attempt being in effect an effort to make morality scientific - and especially when the attempt is seen, as it must in the end be seen, to fail (the moral consciousness being superior to all standards of morality and realizing itself wholly in particular judgments), then ethics as a process of reflection upon the nature of the moral consciousness may be said to begin.

If this be true it follows that one of the chief function of ethics must be criticism of mistaken attempts to find a criterion of morality superior to the pronouncements of the moral consciousness itself.

There is, however, in the Cynic notion of wisdom, no positive criterion beyond the mere negation of irrational desires and prejudices.

It ought to be said that Aristotle does not present the formula just discussed as supplying a criterion of good conduct in any particular case; he expressly leaves this to be determined by " correct reasoning, and the judgment of the practically-wise man (6 cppovcµos)."

Goodness, in short, consists in due combination, in just proportion, of both sorts of " affections," tendency to promote general good being taken as the criterion of the right degrees and proportions.

The former, while accepting utility as the criterion of " material goodness," had adhered to Shaftesbury's view that dispositions, not results of action, were the proper object of moral approval; at the same time, while giving to benevolence the first place in his account of personal merit, he had shrunk from the paradox of treating it as the sole virtue, and had added a rather undefined and unexplained train of qualities, - veracity, fortitude, activity, industry, sagacity, - immediately approved in various degrees by the " moral sense " or the " sense of dignity."

The will of God [so far as it directs behaviour to others] is the immediate rule or criterion of virtue.

He considers that this fundamental rule or imperative " act on a maxim which thou canst will to be law universal " supplies a sufficient criterion for determining particular duties in all cases.

A certain common agreement has been reached concerning the impossibility of regarding pleasure as the sole motive criterion and end of moral action, though different opinions still prevail as to the place occupied by pleasure in the summum bonum, and the possibility of a hedonistic calculus.

Finally, side by side with a theory of the nature of moral obligation thus fundamentally empirical and a posteriori in its outlook, he maintains in his account of justice the existence of the idea of justice as distinct from a mere sentiment, carrying with it an a priori belief in its existence and identical in its a priori and intuitive character with the ultimate criterion of Utilitarianism itself.

He apparently passes from one criterion to the other as best suits the purpose of the moment.

Nor is his attempt to construct a scientific criterion out of data derived from the biological sciences productive of satisfactory results.