polypragmatism

Noun

polypragmatism (countable and uncountable, plural polypragmatisms)

1. The approach of trying various possible therapeutic treatments with no clear diagnostic guide.
   • 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?1933, Heinrich Franz Wolf, Textbook of Physical Therapy, page xi
   • 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'.2008, Klaus Bergdolt, Wellbeing: A Cultural History of Healthy Living, →ISBN, page 92
2. (broadly) The use of multiple approaches to a single issue.
   • 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...1907, George Saintsbury, The Later 19th Century, page 327
   • 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...1908, George Saintsbury -, A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day, page 267
3. The application of a single approach or solution to multiple problems.
   • 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...1983, George Ernest Wright, The Biblical Archaeologist - Volume 46, page 35
   • The manifold practical applications of mensuration, furthermore, is the very theme of works by Worsop, Digges, Dee and so on - the polypragmatism of mathematics.2016, Nicholas de Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War, →ISBN
4. A tendency toward meddling or officiousness.
   • 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.1907, The Living Age - Volume 252, page 707
   • 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...1944, American Bookman: A Quarterly of Literary Theory