| 释义 |
unobˈservable, a.
[un-1 7 b, 5 b.]
1. Incapable of being observed; imperceptible, unnoticeable.
1651Hobbes Leviath. ii. xxix. 169 Which accidents..are not supernaturall, but onely..unobservable. 1664Boyle Exp. touching Colours 114 Little and Singly Unobservable Images of the Lucid Body. a1715South Serm. IV. 163 Such small, such contemptible, and almost unobservable Hints have sometimes unraveled..the deepest-laid Villanies. 1895Baring-Gould Noémi xiii, He had to beware of putting his hand on fire that was unobservable by daylight.
†2. Undeserving of notice or remark. Obs.
1665J. Webb Stone-Heng (1725) 16 It is not unobservable, that these Stones seem to have been..more entire, than when Mr. Jones made his Survey. 1675M. Clifford Hum. Reason 40 It is not unobservable, that the Unity of the Church of God is compared [etc.].
3. n. pl. Things which cannot be observed.
1944Mind LIII. 227 It is not at all certain that there are not highly respected scientific hypotheses which allege the existence of unobservables. 1980Times Lit. Suppl. 17 Oct. 1181/2 The logical positivists held that for a sentence to be meaningful it must be capable of experiential verification. In consequence they had a central problem with discourse about unobservables... Their standard line of solution was some kind of definitional reduction of unobservables to observables.
Hence ˌunobservaˈbility.
1944Mind LIII. 224 The positivist principle..does not tell us anything at all about the observability or unobservability of the facts stated in P. 1979Amer. Pol. Sci. Rev. Mar. 164/2 Unobservability is one reason..for the relative unfamiliarity of political things. |