Word.ws English Dictionary

pretheoretical

pretheoretical adjective: arising before any theoretical considerations.

Adjective

pretheoretical (not comparable)

  1. Arising before any theoretical considerations
    • Let’s grant, as seems plausible, that […] knowledge of what it takes to be a T, according to our pretheoretical notion of Ts, has an important role to play in settling metaphysical disputes about the nature of Ts.2008 April 23, J. L. Dowell, “Empirical metaphysics: the role of intuitions about possible cases in philosophy”, in Philosophical Studies, volume 140, number 1, →DOI

Origin of pretheoretical

From pre- + theoretical.

Words formed from pretheoretical

Questions about pretheoretical

What does pretheoretical mean?
Pretheoretical means arising before any theoretical considerations.
What part of speech is pretheoretical?
Pretheoretical is an adjective.

Words near pretheoretical in the dictionary

  1. pretheatre
  2. prethee
  3. pretheistic
  4. pretheological
  5. pretheology
  6. pretheoretical
  7. pretheoreticality
  8. pretheoretically
  9. pretherapeutic
  10. pretherapeutical
  11. pretherapeutically

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pretheoretical (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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