At no point did he issue a manifesto, always preferring pluralism to
prescriptivism. Too often, the task of circumscribing a journal's ambit in a mission statement resembles a sort of inquisition or symbolic bonfire--Diocletian consigning Christian writing to the flames, or Augustus exiling Ovid and banning his work.
(17) Were that pretence inoperative, were it not also inscribed in law, there could be no point to revealing legal pluralism by unmasking what Rod Macdonald has called "legal monism" (the notion that law is a singular entity), "legal centralism" (the notion that law emanates uniquely from the state), "legal positivism" (the notion that law can be stated in definitive form) and "legal
prescriptivism" (the notion that law resides in a prescription external to oneself).
Although I have distinguished coherentism from pure
prescriptivism,
Jacques Barzun and Allen Walker Read took opposing sides in the "
prescriptivism vs.
So although Walsh identifies himself as a curmudgeon, you might call his approach compassionate
prescriptivism, or at least flexible fussiness.
Without this intrapsychic base for responsibility for human rights, Lonergan would have launched a diatribe similar to those he aired in other places against all forms of
prescriptivism and objectivism and conceptualism and all for the same reason: they are too easily reified and, in that form, too easily imposed on diminished subjects.
One group is purely theoretical, developing and motivating Hare's moral theory, objective
prescriptivism (essays 1-4, 9-11, and 13).
I would like to point out, however, a problem in his argument for SNOOT
Prescriptivism. The idea that language use is and should be dictated by convention is vulnerable to the same style of critique Wallace applies to Descriptivism: taken to its logical extreme,
Prescriptivism is an endorsement of conformity for its own sake.
They make an implicit normative judgment--a prescriptivist judgment, in fact--that text, structure, or original intent ought to predominate in constitutional analysis.(20) By embracing
prescriptivism, even in this narrow sense, formalistic theories open the door to discretionary outcomes, and, as a result, cannot guarantee to inoculate judges against a predisposition toward construction, rather than discovery, of meaning.(21) As this Part shows, outcome sensitivity pervades formalistic theories as naturally as it does the overtly prescriptivist theories --the pragmatism of Richard Posner, or Ronald Dworkin's rights jurisprudence.(22) This second set of theories typically is not concerned with recommending interpretive tactics or techniques.
In 'The Language--Gender Interface: Challenging Co-operation', Deborah Cameron discusses under the label 'verbal hygiene' not only traditional linguistic
prescriptivism but also the popular self-help literature that has drawn on the sex differences research of Tannen and others, and has advised women to 'speak like a man' in order to gain power.
Landau's front-of-the-book essay Dictionaries of English: He prints a splendid section on
prescriptivism (there are degrees of correctness in language usage) and descriptivism (the concept of correctness in language is neither useful nor relevant).