Literary notes about Discriminate (AI summary)
The word "discriminate" in literature is used in a multifaceted way, reflecting both intellectual precision and social critique. On one hand, authors employ it to denote the act of distinguishing between ideas, observations, or phenomena—for example, discerning facts from judgments or genuine insights from mere appearances ([1], [2], [3]). Similarly, thinkers like Rousseau and Santayana use the term as a call for clear, methodical reasoning and the careful sifting of truth from error ([4], [5]). On the other hand, the word is also invoked to critique societal practices and injustices, evident in its use to question biases in institutional practices, such as those in public services or legal statutes ([6], [7]). Thus, across genres and periods, "discriminate" has served both as a tool for cognitive clarity and as a means of challenging moral and social inequities ([8], [9]).
- Elimination of irrelevant meanings (1) It is a common saying that one must learn to discriminate between observed facts and judgments based upon them.
— from How We Think by John Dewey - I learned to discriminate between hypotheses and facts, and to separate the ebullitions of fancy from the deductions of reason.
— from Toronto of Old by Henry Scadding - None the less, the advice to discriminate what is observed from what is inferred is sound practical advice.
— from How We Think by John Dewey - Distrust all opinions which appear before the judgment to discriminate between them.
— from Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau - To discriminate between these things in practice is wisdom, and it should be the part of wisdom to discriminate between them in theory.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana - "Do all eating places discriminate?"
— from Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil by W. E. B. Du Bois - To this end, politically, all laws which discriminate between man and woman, to the injury of the latter, should at once be blotted out.
— from History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I - In a third I shall show how hard it is to discriminate subjective from objective factors in Truth's development.
— from Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking by William James - Black Courtiers listen at the windows, opened for air; discriminate the steeple-bells: ( Roederer, ubi supra. )
— from The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle
