descriptionist

From description +‎ -ist.

descriptionist (plural descriptionists)

1. Synonym of descriptivist
   • 1824, The Monthly Repertory of English Literature, page 344:

     The author of the Waverley novels is another fine example; but he clearly takes his highest rank as a descriptionist—the painter of effects and appearances rather than of facts and of causes.

   • 1897, Canadian Magazine, volume 8, page 105:

     Although he is a descriptionist, he is often more effective than Roberts or Lampman.

   • 1994, Dorothy Ross, Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870-1930, →ISBN, page 134:

     He was, on the other hand, the very opposite of a descriptionist in his physics, especially later in his career.

   • 2002, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, volume 122, page 4:

     “Oh,” said one of my lunch companions, “you’re a descriptionist rather than a prescriptionist.”

2. (philosophy) One who subscribes to descriptionism.

• descriptionism

descriptionist (not comparable)

1. Descriptivist.
   • 2013, William D. Nordhaus, Economics and Policy Issues in Climate Change‎, page 97:

     In effect, they say "a plague on both your houses" to the two sides in the prescriptionist-descriptionist debate.

2. (philosophy) Regarding utterances as primarily descriptive rather than as rigidly specifying a particular thing or kind of thing.
   • 2015 January 8, Leo Carton Mollica, “Explanation and nowness: an objection to the A-Theory”, in Philosophical Studies, →DOI:

     The problem with the descriptionist account of date-times is that it gives the wrong truth conditions to sentences like that in CAESAR.

3. (philosophy) Of or relating to descriptionism (theory of truth).

• descriptionism