eliminationismn.
/ᵻˌlɪmᵻˈneɪʃn̩ɪz(ə)m/, /ᵻˌlɪmᵻˈneɪʃənɪz(ə)m/, U.S. /əˌlɪməˈneɪʃəˌnɪz(ə)m/, /iˌlɪməˈneɪʃəˌnɪz(ə)m/ 1. Philosophy. Originally (in the work of Karl Popper): the doctrine that science progresses by subjecting hypotheses or theories to tests which could falsify and hence eliminate them. Now usually: the view that certain terms and concepts used in a particular field of inquiry fail to describe or refer to real phenomena and should be eliminated from theoretical discourse about the phenomena they purport to describe or explain.
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1945 K. Popper in Economica 12 79 (note) With this, cp. my Logik der Forschung,..esp. the doctrine of tests by way of deduction (‘deductivism’),..and the doctrine that scientific tests are attempts at falsifying theories (‘eliminationism’).
1982 Synthese 52 19 Taken at face value, Quine's position is sheer epistemological Eliminationism; we should just abandon the notions of justification, good reason, warranted assertion, etc., and reconstrue the notions of evidence.
1992 Philos. Rev. 101 33 Several philosophers in the 1960s defended..some form of eliminationism (the view that mentalistic talk and mental entities would eventually lose their place in our attempts to describe and explain the world).
2004 S. Fuller & J. H. Collier Philos., Rhetoric, & End of Knowl. ii. 32 The aim of Popper's falsificationist methodology had been to eliminate false hypotheses... Even as a simple fact about the history of science, eliminationism is hard to justify.
2013 A. Panaïoti Nietzsche & Buddhist Philos. I. i. 33 More recently, Parfit has attempted to distance himself from what he calls ‘the Buddhist view’, by which he means a form of eliminationism concerning persons.
2. The belief or policy that a group of people perceived as enemies should be expelled or eradicated.
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1960 M. G. Ionides Divide & Lose Pref. p. vi I am against Zionist expansionism just as I am against Arab eliminationism, because I want to see a settlement and because I fear further strife and bloodshed if it does not come about.
1996 Foreign Affairs 75 145/1 Goldhagen will probably be attacked for indicting a whole society. But nowhere does he deny that ‘eliminationism’ became ‘exterminationism’ because of the deliberate, systematic policies of Hitler and the Nazis.
2011 Africa News (Nexis) 23 Sept. The world..has began [sic] to embrace a form of politics responsible for some of the worst atrocities ever visited upon humanity—the politics of eliminationism.
This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, September 2018; most recently modified version published online March 2022).
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n.1945