pragmatize

present singular third person pragmatizes · participle present pragmatizing · participle past pragmatized · past pragmatized · alternative pragmatise

1. intransitiveTo consider, represent, or embody (something unreal) as fact; to materialize.

   One of the miraculous passages in the life of Mohammed himself is traced plausibly by Sprenger to such a pragmatized metaphor.

   1871, Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture

   3 more examples

   Anglophiles hoping to pragmatize Mexican culture along the lines of that of the United States, they regarded central and southern Mexico as the sick and lethargic consequence of Spanish oppression and Catholic obscurantism.

   2006, Mary K. Vaughan, Stephen E. Lewis, The Eagle and the Virgin

   When the reader is a critic, and obliged to respond determinately, he is likely to attack James with some exasperation, as not being properly passionate or properly ethical or properly modern or properly Victorian or as being too properly any of the above. In doing so the critic ceases to unconsciously pragmatize; teased out of his shell of moral anonymity he reveals as much about his own ethical and passional predilections as about those of James.

   2011, Anthony Channell Hilfer, The Ethics of Intensity in American Fiction, →ISBN, page 101

   But the oddness of the falsifiability criterion, and the impossibility, on Popper's account, of providing the necessary disposition-free singular descriptive statements which he requires for falsifiability (except at the price of attitudinal relativism) so pragmatize the notion of demarcation that it is not clear that it is doing any work at all.

   2012, Robert S. Cohen, Marx W. Wartofsky, Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science, →ISBN

2. intransitiveTo behave in a pragmatic manner; to focus on the material or practical rather than abstractions.

   If he be a rationalist he may theorize. If he be a man of the world he may pragmatize.

   1939, Austen Kennedy De Blois, Donald Rex Gorham, Christian Religious Education: Principles and Practice, page 195

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   They are generically different ; they preach where they ought to worship, they pragmatize where they ought to pray, they discourse where they ought to send up the “Glory.”

   1856, The Reformed Church Review - Volume 8, page 322

   A boiling kettle, a crying baby, a ringing telephone may interrupt him, but nothing (like a life plan) less immediate than those. It is all free play here, a refusal to pragmatize.

   2010, Susan Neiman, Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin, →ISBN