The Collaborative International Dictionary
Regulative \Reg"u*la*tive\ (r?g"?*l?*t?v), a.
Tending to regulate; regulating.
--Whewell.-
(Metaph.) Necessarily assumed by the mind as fundamental to all other knowledge; furnishing fundamental principles; as, the regulative principles, or principles a priori; the regulative faculty.
--Sir W. Hamilton.Note: These terms are borrowed from Kant, and suggest the thought, allowed by Kant, that possibly these principles are only true for the human mind, the operations and belief of which they regulate.
Wiktionary
a. 1 of, or relating to regulation 2 having a regulatory function
WordNet
adj. restricting according to rules or principles; "a regulatory gene" [syn: regulatory]
Usage examples of "regulative".
To be sure, in cases of flat conflict between an act or acts of Congress regulative of such commerce and a State legislative act or acts, from whatever State power ensuing, the act of Congress is today recognized, and was recognized by Marshall, as enjoying an unquestionable supremacy.
Nay, more, we need not be afraid to admit certain anthropomorphisms in that idea, which favour the regulative principle of our investigations.
Such a supposition, if used constitutively, goes far beyond where our present observation would justify us in going, which shows that it is nothing but a regulative principle of reason, leading us on to the highest systematical unity, by the idea of an intelligent causality in the supreme cause of the world, and by the supposition that this, as the highest intelligence, is the cause of everything, according to the wisest design.
In one word, that transcendental thing is only the schema of the regulative principle with which reason spreads systematical unity, as far as possible, over all experience.
The regulative principle of postmodern irony is that we can survive only by squandering ourselves, which is to say by becoming yet more cynical than our controllers.
The method, on the contrary, of looking for order in nature, according to such a principle, and the maxim of admitting such order (though it may be uncertain where and how far) as existing in nature in general, is certainly a legitimate and excellent regulative principle of reason, only that, as such, it goes far beyond where experience or observation could follow it.