Sentence examples for ascribing purpose from inspiring English sources

"Starting with Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus," he told me, "there has been a strain of teleology in the study of plant biology" — a habit of ascribing purpose or intention to the behavior of plants.

Even Darwin recognized that the tendency for humans to ascribe purpose to living things posed an issue for understanding his theory, addressing the seemingly purposeful nature of structures in his discussion of "Difficulties on Theory" (Darwin 1859).

If there is a discrepancy between the ascribed purposes and the actually achieved or presumably resulting goals, statements can be made regarding the existence of (gateways to) institutional corruption.

In other words, for whomever each juror ascribed intent to impede the S.E.C., the worker must have also acted to impede as part of employment by the firm and done so for the purpose of benefiting Andersen.

Yet he has attracted throngs of Americans who ascribe higher purpose to him than he has demonstrated in a freewheeling campaign marked by bursts of false and outrageous allegations, personal insults, xenophobic nationalism, unapologetic sexism and positions that shift according to his audience and his whims.

It is not possible, Cleanthes argues, that we would hesitate for a moment to ascribe some design and purpose to this voice and conclude that it bears some resemblance to the intelligent source of a human voice (D, 3.2 3/152 3).

The ambitious purpose ascribed to the Treaty by the Court of Appeals, we believe, places a greater burden on its language and history than they can logically bear.

According to Neander (2006) the configuration of visible features is the right style of visual content to ascribe for the purpose of mainstream scientific explanations of an anuran's visual capacities.

But when we try to ascribe divine meaning, purpose or reason to tragedy, we merely compound the pain and turn God into a villain.

22. Unlike the others, Braun thinks the purpose-relativity in ascribing "S knows what x is" lies not in the semantics of the ascription, but rather in its pragmatics.

But reflective judgment is also described as responsible for two specific kinds of judgments: aesthetic judgments (judgments about the beautiful and the sublime) and teleological judgments (judgments which ascribe ends or purposes to natural things, or which characterize them in purposive or functional terms).