Pregiven

For example, when a red spot on a sheet of paper strongly stimulates me, the whiteness of the paper as well as the red spot are pregiven and both of them undergo the structurization of “figure-ground.”

We therefore arrive at the realization that Aristotle conceived of the truth of a-synthetic wholes as pregiven in the same sense; they, as such, are therefore always actual.

The ontological and epistemological commitments are basically twofold: We assume that the world is pregiven, that its features can be specified prior to any cognitive activity.

The geographical cohesion of state space is never pregiven but is the product of specific programs and initiatives that directly or indirectly impact state spatial structures and the geographies of state policy.

The long and slow transition to thinking of society as a human process and product, rather than as a pregiven, divine order, has also given rise to the realization that human beings – both individuals and societies – have specific potential to be other than what they already are.

Some theoretical strategies go so far as to insist that all behavior simply emanates from pregiven structure (as Meyer does in Meyer et al., 1987). Others insist that no behavior at all is pregiven: Because structure in this argument means institutions— pregiven norms, values, beliefs, and practices— it is open-textured, incomplete, cannot guarantee its own applications, therefore, all behavior is action, has agency (Garfinkel 1964; Strauss et al. 1963).

For Schmitt, such a conception is contradictory, since he believes that in democracy such a will has to be pregiven at the outset and cannot be the product of discussion.

Too often writing—in the broadest sense—is treated as a communicational medium where the subjects of that communication are constituted prior to the writing, where the objects of that communication are also constituted prior to that writing, and where the task of writing is seen as transparently mediating between already pregiven subjects, pregiven objects, and a preconstituted mise en scène.