pregiven

English

Etymology

pre- +‎ given. The philosophical sense is a calque of the German term Vorgegeben.

Adjective

pregiven (comparative more pregiven, superlative most pregiven)

1. (philosophy, ontology) Existing in the world, as opposed to arising from human apprehension.
   • 2012, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Soul and Body in Husserlian Phenomenology: Man and Nature, page 81:

     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.”

   • 2012, Werner Marx, The Meaning of Aristotle’s ‘Ontology’, page 20:

     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.

   • 2017, Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind, page 135:

     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.

2. Naturally occurring, as opposed to being socially constructed.
   • 2004, Neil Brenner, New State Spaces, page 91:

     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.

   • 2017, Stephan van Erp, Christiane Alpers, Christopher Cimorelli, Salvation in the World: The Crossroads of Public Theology:

     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.

   • 2018, Morris Zelditch, Status, Power, and Legitimacy, page 65:

     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).

3. Provided beforehand; present at the start.
   • 2002, Radhika Desai, “Fetishizing Phantoms: Carl Schmitt, Chantal Mouffe, and "The Political"”, in Abigail B. Bakan, Eleanor MacDonald, editors, Critical Political Studies: Debates and Dialogues from the Left, page 402:

     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.

   • 2015, “Staging the Politics of Difference: Homi Bhabha's Critical Literacy, Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham.”, in Gary A. Olson, Lynn Worsham, Henry A. Giroux, editors, Politics of Possibility: Encountering the Radical Imagination, page 133:

     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.

   • 2022, Wouter Werner, Repetition and International Law:

     What may just as well have been otherwise is reactualized as the manifestation of a pregiven category.

Noun

pregiven (uncountable)

1. (philosophy, ontology) That which is actual, as opposed to our concepts or apprehension of the world.
   • 2000, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Impetus and Equipoise in the Life-Strategies of Reason, page 266:

     However, mining an analytic vein above that of Kant's work, Husserl distinguishes clearly between the pregiven to human experience and what is given to the human consciousness that gives the pregiven form, making it pass from the "hidden" to the "apparent," to the given.

   • 2006, Kevin Hermberg, Husserl's Phenomenology: Knowledge, Objectivity and Others, page 75:

     We live and are conscious against a background of the pregiven.

   • 2015, François De Gandt, “Passivity and Interest (Experience and Judgment)”, in Burt Hopkins, John Drummond, editors, The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, volume 13:

     In a sense, there is a pregiven before any act of the Ego, but in another sense, there can be no pregiven in absolute, no pregiven an sich.