Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Making a thing what it is; essential.
- adjective Having power to institute, establish, or enact.
- adjective Of or relating to the synthesis of a protein or an enzyme at a constant rate regardless of physiological demand or the concentration of a substrate.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Constituting, forming, or composing; constituent; elemental; essential.
- Having power to enact or establish; instituting.
- In the Kantian philosophy, principles according to which an object of pure intuition can be constructed a priori: opposed to regulative principles (which see, unite regulative).
- In physical chemistry, a term introduced by Ostwald to denote those properties of a compound which depend on the constitution of the molecule, or on the mode of union and arrangement of the atoms in the molecule.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Tending or assisting to constitute or compose; elemental; essential.
- adjective Having power to enact, establish, or create; instituting; determining.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective having the
power orauthority toconstitute ,establish orenact something - adjective having the power or authority to
appoint someone to office - adjective that makes something what it is;
essential - adjective that forms a
constituent part of something else - adjective biochemistry (of an enzyme) that is continuously produced at a constant rate
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective constitutional in the structure of something (especially your physical makeup)
Etymologies
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Examples
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Not unlike any other term constitutive of our political vocabulary,
Intellectual Conservative Politics and Philosophy Jack Kerwick 2010
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"The new design of the referendum, which we call constitutive, will be acted on by Kenyans to adopt the draft constitution.
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Our love-icons and constellations of love-imagery aren't perennials, they're rather what archaeologist Colin Renfrew calls constitutive symbols: "in defining symbols, we are not just playing with words, but recognising features of the material world with which human individuals come to engage"; "that engagement . . . is socially mediated, and it comes about when other features of the society make that feasible."
Love in literature 2011
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Such rules are the so-called constitutive rules, as opposed to regulative rules (the terminology is taken from Kant).
Him 2009
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Mary Midgely's 1967 article “The Game Game” takes the argument further, in an attempt to refute Rawls 'claim that the notion of constitutive rules can truly capture the nature of a game.
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For a brief discussion of the notion of constitutive luck see the following supplementary document:
Justice and Bad Luck Lippert-Rasmussen, Kasper 2009
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Some theorists, notably Searle (Searle 1995), have sought to identify institutions with a particular species of rule, namely, so called constitutive rules.
Social Institutions Miller, Seumas 2007
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The property that is constitutive of an event is essential to that event; thus Lawrence Lombard (Lombard 1986) calls the constitutive property of an event a "property essence" of that event.
States of Affairs Wetzel, Thomas 2003
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My chief disagreement with Doug is over the extent to which interpersonal morality, and in particular a principled dedication to rights, can be identified as a constitutive part of human flourishing.
Cato Unbound 2010
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Jyoti Jaiswal, a research assistant professor and Sanford Simon, head of the Laboratory of Cellular Biophysics at Rockefeller University, examined the most common form of cellular export process called constitutive exocytosis, a continual ferrying of goods involved in the regular life and maintenance of all eukaryotic cells.
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