prescriptivismn.

1948 I. Poldauf On Hist. Probl. Eng. Gram. 118 Prescriptivism is the form of authoritarianism characteristic of the English, not Scottish, grammarians of the latter half of the 18th century.

1953 Mod. Lang. Notes 68 580 Linguists..object not so much to prescriptivism per se..as to those hoary handbook prescriptions which have no basis in actual cultivated usage.

1964 Word 20 289 The charge of prescriptivism is also made against Chomsky.

1976 Amer. Speech 1973 48 264 Prescriptivism is wrong, the reader is told again.

1991 Lang. in Society 20 473 There are two principal reasons for the lack of success in the spread of Hindi as an official language: prescriptivism in the promotion of a Sanscritized Hindi and overeagerness on the part of native speakers of Hindi in its promotion.

1960 A. C. Garnett Ethics x. 338 The Prescriptionist thesis, as presented by Toulmin and Baier, constitutes a well-reasoned reply to moral skepticism, emotivism, and the subjectivistic interpretation of prescriptivism.

1976 T. D. Perry Moral Reasoning & Truth i. 33 Moore's famous doctrine of the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ which has been accepted in principle by three of the four major tendencies in analytical ethics: intuitionism, emotivism, prescriptivism.

1986 Philos. Q. 36 1 How has the change come about from universal prescriptivism..to a thoroughgoing utilitarianism.

2002 Herald (Glasgow) (Nexis) 19 Feb. 20 Prescriptivism—so called because Hare held that moral judgments prescribe specific, universal courses of action—was influential through the 1950s and 1960s. It later fell from fashion.