Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Prescriptive \Pre*scrip"tive\, a. [L. praescriptivus of a demurrer or legal exception.]
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(Law) Consisting in, or acquired by, immemorial or long-continued use and enjoyment; as, a prescriptive right of title; pleading the continuance and authority of long custom.
The right to be drowsy in protracted toil has become prescriptive.
--J. M. Mason. Of or pertaining to the doctrine that acceptable grammatical rules should be prescribed by authority, rather than be determined by common usage.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1748, from Late Latin praescriptivus, from praescript-, past participle stem of praescribere (see prescription). Or formed in English from archaic prescript "a direction" (1530s), from Latin praescriptum.
Wiktionary
a. Of or pertaining to prescribe or enjoining, especially an action or behavior based on a norm or standard.
WordNet
adj. giving directives or rules; "prescriptive grammar is concerned with norms of or rules for correct usage" [syn: normative] [ant: descriptive]
based on or prescribing a norm or standard; "normative grammar" [syn: normative]
Usage examples of "prescriptive".
I will explain how the problems raised by the three foregoing points are to be solved, thus correcting the philosophical mistakes that lead to subjectivism and relativism in regard to moral values and prescriptive judgments.
Judgments about these matters are intimately related to the type of judgment that I have just called prescriptive or normative.
But in their view, our judgments of value about good and evil, right and wrong, or our prescriptive judgments about what ought or ought not to be done, are neither true nor false.
The philosophical mistakes with which this chapter is concerned assert, for different reasons, that moral values and prescriptive judgments are subjective and relative.
Can we find grounds for affirming the truth of prescriptive conclusions?
The answer is yes if we can find a way of combining a prescriptive with a descriptive premise as the basis of our reasoning to a conclusion.
There is another critical point that tends to remove prescriptive judgments from the sphere of truth and put them in the realm of mere opinions that are neither true nor false.
One other thing that is in part responsible is a failure to answer the question about how prescriptive judgments can be true.
His categorical imperative is a prescriptive statement that he regards as a moral law by which our reason must be bound because it is self-evidently true.
I will deal first with the special kind of truth that is appropriate to prescriptive judgments.
This will lay the ground for the formulation of the one and only prescriptive judgment that has self-evident truth.
It serves as the requisite first principle of moral philosophy and enables us to draw prescriptive conclusions from premises that combine prescriptive and descriptive truths.
We can say, therefore, that a prescriptive judgment has practical truth if it expresses a desire for a good that we need.
This conclusion has prescriptive truth, based on the criterion that what it prescribes conforms to right desire, desire for something that we by nature need.
Troeltsch says, referring again to a prescriptive exam everyone but Hal wishes now to forget.