pluralisticadj.

1837 Morning Chron. 7 Sept. 3/5 Intolerance and bigotry, with all their pluralistic supporters, would be universally annihilated.

1854 Edinb. Rev. 99 360 Even the ‘pluralistic’ marriage service has been published [by the Mormons].

1958 Times Lit. Suppl. 31 Oct. 619/2 Stekel..says that pluralistic orgies are tribal in derivation, and that frequently the paraphiliac who engages in them seeks a family combination.

1993 Toronto Star (Nexis) 11 Sept. (Starweek) 33 A Matter Of Principle looks at pluralistic marriage within Mormon fundamentalism.

1873 N. Amer. Rev. July 56 The primordial Something can be either One or Many. If we admit the pluralistic principle, we have..no further difficulty.

1884 B. Bosanquet et al. tr. H. Lotze Metaphysic l. 443 What I looked for in vain in other statements of the pluralistic hypothesis.

1909 W. James (title) Pluralistic universe.

1963 F. C. Copleston Hist. Philos. VII. ii. xii. 252 A pluralistic metaphysics which calls to mind the atoms of Democritus and the monads of Leibnitz.

1988 Brit. Jrnl. Philos. Sci. 39 311 The limited reducibility of theories..leads not only to cumulativity of scientific knowledge but also to a pluralistic epistemology and ontology.

1912 C. Sarolea Anglo-German Prob. 193 Ours is a ‘pluralistic’ universe, to use the expression of William James, a universe of free activities; and this pluralistic principle applies to the political world as much as to the moral and spiritual world. All nations are complementary.

1919 H. J. Laski in Philos. Rev. 28 562 (title) The pluralistic state.

1964 T. B. Bottomore Elites & Soc. vi. 119 Aron, when he urges the importance of the diffusion of power in the pluralistic democracies does not invoke only the principal elites.

1984 D. Cupitt Sea of Faith vi. 159 In their different ways India, the Roman Empire, and especially Iran were at certain times in the past highly pluralistic.

2003 New Yorker 10 Feb. 61/1 The opposition leaders at the conference in London in December had agreed on a pluralistic political system for post-Saddam Iraq.

1932 F. H. Allport in P. S. Achilles Psychol. at Work 218 The principle of pluralistic ignorance, which accompanies our tendency to assume that the great body called the public has a definite intent or wish which the government should carry out.

1950 T. M. Newcomb Social Psychol. xvi. 608 We have a condition for which F. H. Allport..suggested the term pluralistic ignorance. Everyone assumes that everyone except himself accepts the norms uncritically.

1997 Public Opinion Q. 61 227 Regarding pluralistic ignorance as a problem of information, we consider its implications in terms of cross-sectional variation as well as over time.

1880 Athenæum 25 Dec. 851/3 [Julius Bahnsen's] philosophy..defines the ‘Ding an sich’ of Schopenhauer, the Will, pluralistically, and not, as Hartmann does, monistically.

1931 Jrnl. Philos. 28 590 For the initial processes of James' Radical Empiricism do not necessarily lead to the type of neutralism that is so generally associated with the pluralistically devised and analytically determined neutral entities of neo-realism.

1991 Internat. Affairs 67 395 Thinking globally, thinking pluralistically, thinking in terms of partners rather than dependents, thinking multilaterally—these do not come naturally to Americans.