determinability

determinability

English

Etymology

determine +‎ -ability

Noun

determinability (countable and uncountable, plural determinabilities)

1. The quality of being determinable.
   • 1826, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, "On Instinct in Connection with the Understanding (in Comment on Aphorism IX)":

     One of the wisest of uninspired men has not hesitated to declare the dog a great mystery, on account of this dawning of a moral nature unaccompanied by any the least evidence of reason, in whichever of the two senses we interpret the word—whether as the practical reason, that is, the power of proposing an ultimate end, the determinability of the Will by ideas; or as the sciential reason, that is, the faculty of concluding universal and necessary truths from particular and contingent appearances.

   • 1902, William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture 3:

     This absolute determinability of our mind by abstractions [pg 057] is one of the cardinal facts in our human constitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us as they do, we turn towards them and from them, we seek them, hold them, hate them, bless them, just as if they were so many concrete beings.