But we also hold a conception of the world which we inherited from older moral and religious traditions.
It is an interesting question to what extent Xunzi held a scientific conception of nature.
A detailed examination of the source materials, in their view, illustrates that the classical republicans held a decidedly negative conception of political liberty and indeed, the republican conception of freedom as independence from arbitrary or uncontrolled power in particular (see especially Skinner 1984, 1991, 1998, 2008; Spitz 1995; Pettit 1997; Viroli 2002).
Given the rhetorical prominence of liberty in the classical republican writings, it follows from their holding a negative conception of freedom that they cannot have been advancing a perfectionist political philosophy, as the civic humanists claim.
On the constructivist interpretation, Xunzi holds a functional conception of morality, according to which it is invented to harmonize the interests of individuals and to constrain and transform the heedless pursuit of short-term gratification for the sake of promoting the long-term interests of the individual and the group.
The results of this study revealed that the participating preservice teachers held a wide range of conception and misconception of evolution, were somewhat influenced by the tutorials, and had an array of visions for teaching evolution.
Results demonstrated the children held a wide range of conceptions concerning plant structure and function.
For the manner in which the initial security council resolution was contorted out of all recognition from the protection of civilians to, in effect, outright regime change has left a sour taste in the mouths of powers like China, Russia and India who still hold an absolute conception of state sovereignty".
He can thus hold to a conception of truth by claiming that "if a true statement does have a translation equivalent … the latter will be true as well" (1992: 68).
The normative conception of purposiveness is also criticized by Teufel (2011), who argues that Kant held an etiological and non-teleological conception of purposiveness: on Teufel's view, an ascription of purposiveness to an object makes an ontological claim to the effect that the object is the outcome of a rational, conceptually guided process.
