Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The act of confuting.
- noun Something that confutes.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The act of confuting, disproving, or proving to be false or invalid; overthrow, as of arguments, opinions, reasoning, theories, or conclusions.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun The act or process of confuting; refutation.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The act or process of
confuting ;refutation .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun evidence that refutes conclusively
- noun the speech act of refuting conclusively
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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Some hold the Koranic passage to have been revealed in confutation of the Jews, who pretended that if a man lay with his wife backwards, he would beget a cleverer child.
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But his confutation was the factual confutation of experience.
The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 Thomas De Quincey 1822
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Seiffmilts, in his great work concerning the divine order and regularity in the destiny of the human race, has a chapter entitled a confutation of this idea; I read it with great eagerness, and found therein that this idea militated against the glory and goodness of God, and must therefore be false, -- but further confutation found I none!
Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey Joseph Cottle 1811
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Seiffmilts, [2] in his great work concerning the divine order and regularity in the destiny of the human race, has a chapter entitled a confutation of this idea; I read it with great eagerness, and found therein that this idea militated against the glory and goodness of God, and must therefore be false, -- but further confutation found I none!
Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1803
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And the refutation of these has been such as alone it could be: that is to say, by signs and the evidence of causes, since no other kind of confutation was open to me, differing as I do from the others both on first principles and on rules of demonstration.
The New Organon 2005
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Dar Hyal, alone, with his blastic theory of art, can specially apply it to music to the confutation of all the first words and the last.
CHAPTER XIV 2010
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I like confutation much better, obscure though it may be in the average Canadian vernacular.
Rebuttal: The Tamil Protesters Are Not My People « Unambiguously Ambidextrous 2009
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Yet, in the confutation to the President's address, Governor Bobby Jindal, of Louisiana presented the traditional divisive wisdom.
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As I am still in possession of that imperfect organ, I will proceed to use it to the confutation of some of his other fallacies.
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But, this notion of Matter seems too extravagant to deserve a confutation.
A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, by George Berkeley 2006
jmjarmstrong commented on the word confutation
JM thoroughly enjoys a good confutation as long as it’s someone else being confuted
June 27, 2009