observative

English

Adjective

observative (comparative more observative, superlative most observative)

1. observant; watchful
   • 1983, Littcrit - Issues 16-17, page 41:

     Taking the cue from the depth and intensity of her terse poems, numbering 1775 (composed during four decades but except seven, all unpublished, during her lifetime) one feels she was engaged in a sort of poetic sadhana; she is curiously observative of the life around her and is concerned with 'deeper interests and finer suggestions.'

   • 2003, Rodney Tolley, Sustainable Transport, page 112:

     That street life/compact city perspective is common to all the observative authors, therefore embedding the compact city concept of formal quality both in the selection of relevant formal components and in the definition of criteria for their quantitative measurement.

   • 2021, Rafael Bernabe, Walt Whitman and His Caribbean Interlocutors, page 19:

     As early as 1842, he had referred to what he called his 'observative mood' and the search for a vantage point from which the city could be contemplated as a vast, rushing spectacle.

2. Pertaining to observation.
   • 1830, Frederick Clissold, Practical Hints for the Development of the Human Mind, page 9:

     A Habit may often raise the common conceptive sensations to the same degree of vividness as the observative, and even to a degree still higher.

   • 1839, “Muhammadan Ethics”, in Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British and Foreign India, China, and Australasia, volume 30, number 117, page 21:

     Some again have pointed it out as an involution of the argument, that they first divide wisdom into observative and active, one of which is identical with the science of morals, which comprises four virtues, of which the aforesead wisdom is one; so that wisdom would here be a division of itself.

   • 1847, Thomas Forster, Original Letters of Locke; Algernon Sidney; and Anthony Lord Shaftesbury:

     When these conceptive sensations occur during sleep, when the observative sensations do not intrude and force into notice their more vivid and consistent imagery, the conceptive sensations amount to what is called dreaming, in which state the mind mistakes them for the observative, or, in other words, believes them to be external objects.

   • 2013, Diederik Aerts, Jaroslaw Pykacz, Quantum Structures and the Nature of Reality, page 119:

     But, on the other hand, this Quantum Logic obtained by completion does not contain, in the case of complex systems, only observative elements (testable properties), but even elements that are non-observative (theoretical properties), at least in the sense that they do not correspond to first order properties that can be directly tested on a physical object.

3. Pertaining to an observative (utterance about an observation).
   • 2000, Claudio Garola, Arcangelo Rossi, The Foundations Of Quantum Mechanics:

     Nevertheless, even Quine, one of the strongest enemies of the distinction between observation and theory, maintains that it is possible to characterise observative sentences.

   • 2011, Knut J. Olawsky, A Grammar of Urarina, page 443:

     As the examples in (653) illustrate, this does not only involve utterances that may be understood as answers to questions (cf. (653a)), but also short observative statements as the ones in (653b), that occurred in a picture description.

   • 2014, J. Peregrin, Inferentialism: Why Rules Matter:

     They urge the existence of 'observatives' as specific speech acts that are conceptual, but not necessarily propositional.

   • 2018, Nicolas Brisset, Economics and Performativity:

     In his own style of "midwife" (maïeutician), Austin begins by taking the standard approach to language at its word while observing that many statements cannot be classified as observative, being themselves actions influencing the content and evolution of the external world.

Noun

observative (plural observatives)

1. An observation.
   • 1904, Massachusetts Medical Society, Medical Communications - Volume 19, page 536:

     Taking these observations as a basis for his experiments, Westphalen tried placing patients with habitual constipation on the regular peasant diet, with marked substantiation of the original hypothesis deduced from his general observatives, that the vegetable diet serves as a marked stimulus to intestinal action.

   • 2015, Carl B Sachs, Intentionality and the Myths of the Given, page 146:

     The observatives on which the totality of our empirical knowledge rests are themselves the result of the transformation of perceptual habits through initiation into the discursive community.

   • 2022, Andrew J. Farrara, The Modern Divine Comedy Book 8:

     PARISIAN TEENAGE WRITER: "I am writing a book about the Paris Riots and Student Revolution in 1968 and need some personal observatives.”

2. (language) An utterance that describes or calls attention to something that the speaker observes.
   • 2009, Rebecca Kukla, Mark Lance, Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’:

     Now consider an observative that does not immediately raise the problem of ellipsis: "Willard is on the mat!" Unlike "Lo, a rabbit!," or even just "A rabbit!," this observative utterance takes the form of a proposition that can function as a purely declaratival expression.

   • 2017, Giacomo Turbanti, Robert Brandom's Normative Inferentialism, page 55:

     Yet, Kukla and Lance notice, the entitlement to an observative is essentially agent-relative and expresses an unsharable perceptual state, for of course no one else can be entitled to such an expression but the one who actually is in that state.