Word: polypragmatism Part of Speech: noun Etymology: From poly- + pragmatism. 1. The approach of trying various possible therapeutic treatments with no clear diagnostic guide. Labels: countable, uncountable Example: Why interfere with a self-limited condition unless some unusual feature, a danger sign, makes its appearance? Polypragmatism was always ridiculous. Is it not polypragmatism if we do something useless, unnecessary, uncalled for? Example: In the later imperial age, medical polypragmatism seems to have been the order of the day. The most diverse remedies were administered, not least because, as Galen himself admitted, 'the people demand medication'. 2. The use of multiple approaches to a single issue. Labels: broadly, countable, uncountable Example: It would appear, on the whole, that the country is going through a very natural transition-period after the blossoming-time from Bellman to Runeberg, and that the present or recent literary activity is mainly on the surface, and of no particular importance. Perhaps this might be said of the parallel movements in more countries than one, or two, or three. 'Even the literary polypragmatism of Strindberg, as of other contemporary writers, is a “sign. Example: Epic, tragedy, lyric, satire, epigram itself— Martial has tried them all and dropped them, because he feels himself beaten by Tucca. This is not fair; let Tucca leave him at least one kind, the kind that he doesn't care for. It is not fanciful, surely, to find a critique of poetical polypragmatism here also. 3. The application of a single approach or solution to multiple problems. Labels: countable, uncountable Example: Its prima facie presence can be immediately grasped in the controlled critical judgments of a Polybius or a Plutarch or a Sophocles attempting to penetrate to the causes of the most dense phenomenon, human polypragmatism. It is present in equal measure in Demosthenes' oration, "On the Crown," and in the Roman Pantheon, where the syntax of word and stone is stretched into ever larger and more complex architectonic units with such ease and skill and daring that the spectator can move effortlessly from part to whole and back again without either moral or aesthetic vertigo. Example: The manifold practical applications of mensuration, furthermore, is the very theme of works by Worsop, Digges, Dee and so on - the polypragmatism of mathematics. 4. A tendency toward meddling or officiousness. Labels: countable, uncountable Example: Further, Balzac's polypragmatism on the one hand, and that tendency to careful and official preservation of all business documents which the French have inherited from their Roman lords on the other, made it pretty certain that fresh matter would turn up. Example: The curse of polypragmatism that brought modern mass misery has never been more keenly pointed out than by a great man who stood at the very cradle of the bourgeois era, Blaise Pascal. In his thoughts on "Human Misery" he writes: "The most intolerable punishment for the human soul is to live with itself and think of itself. For that reason the soul is constantly concerned with the effort to forget itself, by occupying itself with all manner of things that prevent introspection..."