Pragmatic vs Positivism - What's the difference?
pragmatic | positivism |
Practical, concerned with making decisions and actions that are useful in practice, not just theory.
* The sturdy furniture in the student lounge was pragmatic , but unattractive.
*
philosophical; dealing with causes, reasons, and effects, rather than with details and circumstances; said of literature.
* Sir W. Hamilton
* M. Arnold
(philosophy) A doctrine that states that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge, and that such knowledge can only come from positive affirmation of theories through strict scientific method, refusing every form of metaphysics.
Practical spirit, sense of reality, concreteness.
(legal) A school of thought in jurisprudence in which the law is seen as separated from moral values, the law is posited by lawmakers (humans).
As an adjective pragmatic
is practical, concerned with making decisions and actions that are useful in practice, not just theory.As a noun positivism is
(philosophy) a doctrine that states that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge, and that such knowledge can only come from positive affirmation of theories through strict scientific method, refusing every form of metaphysics.pragmatic
English
Alternative forms
* pragmatick (archaic) * pragmatique (obsolete)Adjective
(en adjective)- Nor indeed are these restrictions pragmatic'' in nature: i.e. the ill-formedness of the ''heed''-sentences in (60) is entirely different in kind from the oddity of sentences like:
(61) !That man will eat any car which thinks he?s stupid
which is purely ''pragmatic (i.e. lies in the fact that (61) describes the kind of bizarre situation which just doesn?t happen in the world we are familiar with, where cars don?t think, and people don?t eat cars).
- Pragmatic history.
- Pragmatic poetry.