Word Finder - purposive

definition

Serving a particular purpose; adapted to a given purpose, especially through natural evolution.

definition

Done or performed with a conscious purpose or intent.

synonyms

• deliberate
• intentional
• purposeful

definition

Pertaining to purpose, as reflected in behaviour or mental activity.

definition

Pertaining to or demonstrating purpose.

definition

Possessed of a firm purpose.

synonyms

• determined
• resolute

definition

(grammar) Of a clause or conjunction: expressing purpose.

Variation was in fact a purposive response.

These difficulties arise quite naturally from the obligation, which metaphysicians, theologians, moral philosophers, men of science, and psychologists alike recognize, to give an account, consistent with their theories, of the relation of man's power of deliberate and purposive activity to the rest of the universe.

We have shown that the direct observation of the origin of new characters in palaeontology brings them within that domain of natural law and order to which the evolution of the physical universe conforms. The nature of this law, which, upon the whole, appears to be purposive or teleological in its operations, is altogether a mystery which may or may not be illumined by future research.

It throws light on many phases of the search for truth, upon the plain man's claim to start with a subject which he knows whose predicate which he does not know is still to be developed, or again upon his use of the negative form of judgment, when the further determination of his purposive system is served by a positive judgment from without, the positive content of which is yet to be dropped as irrelevant to the matter in hand.

Moreover, if philosophy is to complete its constructive work, it must bring the course of human history within its survey, and exhibit the sequence of events as an evolution in which the purposive action of reason is traceable.

And though ultimately the attribution of responsibility for conduct is further limited to actions which are the result of purposive choice (1rpoaipeoi.), Aristotle appears to waver between a view which regards 7rpoaipecns as involving an ultimate choice between divergent ends of moral action and one which would make it consist in the choice of means to an end already determined.

He then asks what is required to be a rationally purposive agent in the first place?

A computing device may be either generally purposive, universal, or specialized.

This was followed by a small qualitative research project using purposive sampling to give a broad representation of clients.

Idealism starts from the relativity of the world to purposive consciousness.

Such changes as occur come about, not in consequence of a new direction taken by conscious policy, but rather in the way that fashions in dress alter amongst ourselves, by subconscious, hardly purposive drifting.

Study sites were selected by a process of purposive sampling.

Purposive interpretation of a contract is a useful tool where the purpose can be identified with reasonable certainty.

A purposive sample of 20 older adults discharged from hospital.

The Court of Appeal, on the basis of a purposive construction, held that it did.

The legal system now more commonly uses a ' purposive approach ', meaning the intended purpose of the law is taken into account.

Their attempts at purposive action are instead embedded in concrete, on-going systems of social relations.

Moral virtue, which is that of the irrational desires so far as they are obedient to reason, is a purposive habit in the mean.

But in Ethics a man's individual good is his own happiness; and his happiness is no mere state, but an activity of soul according to virtue in a mature life, requiring as conditions moderate bodily and external goods of fortune; his virtue is (I) moral virtue, which is acquired by habituation, and is a purposive habit of performing actions in the mean determined by right reason or prudence; requiring him, not to exclude, but to moderate his desires; and (2) intellectual virtue, which is either prudence of practical, or wisdom of speculative intellect; and his happiness is a kind of ascending scale of virtuous activities, in which moral virtue is limited by prudence, and prudence by wisdom; so that the speculative life of wisdom is the happiest and most divine, and the practical life of prudence and moral virtue secondary and human.

In The Wisdom of God, &c., Ray recites innumerable examples of the perfection of organic mechanism, the multitude and variety of living creatures, the minuteness and usefulness of their parts, and many, if not most, of the familiar examples of purposive adaptation and design in nature were suggested by him, such as the structure of the eye, the hollowness of the bones, the camel's stomach and the hedgehog's armour.

It insists that all thought is personal and purposive and that "pure"' thought is a figment.