How to Use determinism in a Sentence

determinism

noun
  • But determinism and fate vs. free will are not the main focuses of the play.
    Jack Butler, National Review, 3 July 2021
  • For them, the idea of determinism – that one thing leads to another – is sacrosanct.
    The Physics Arxiv Blog, Discover Magazine, 15 Feb. 2022
  • And when you're done, check out this 2007 piece by Mike Hulme, who also warned about the seduction of climate determinism.
    Keith Kloor, Discover Magazine, 20 Mar. 2014
  • If the answer to the Question is free will, then the answers to the other questions matter. If determinism is the law of the universe, then nothing matters.
    Craig Hanks, National Review, 2 May 2020
  • I’d spent more than enough time thinking about determinism.
    Mark Greif, New York Times, 3 Nov. 2016
  • What happens to Didion when a narrow and cracked determinism swallows not just the women’s movement but the whole world?
    Zadie Smith, The New Yorker, 24 Dec. 2021
  • In a purely neurological sense, if determinism held sway, his patients have no free will and no hope.
    Steve Volk, Discover Magazine, 10 Dec. 2013
  • In the Mandelbrot set, order and chaos lived in harmony; determinism and free will could be reconciled.
    Quanta Magazine, 26 Jan. 2024
  • Researchers shy away from calling children psychopaths; the term carries too much stigma, and too much determinism.
    Barbara Bradley Hagerty, The Atlantic, 16 May 2017
  • Both determinism and free will can lend themselves to a conception of life that implies a sense of underlying order.
    The New Yorker, 27 Nov. 2023
  • Third, the moral challenge to retribution has nothing to do with freedom or determinism.
    Kieran Setiya, The Atlantic, 3 Nov. 2023
  • This one-two punch of determinism and reversibility means that, in terms of physics, information must be preserved during any process.
    Paul Sutter, Ars Technica, 3 Oct. 2022
  • Well, an algorithm is simply a series of predictable steps to reach an outcome, and in the study of philosophy, this idea plays a big part in questions about free will versus determinism.
    Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 10 June 2021
  • The war on terror had just been declared, and the unfolding American military action was cloaked in purposeful determinism in the name of freedom and against tyranny.
    Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker, 13 Aug. 2021
  • Instead the world is a layer cake of determinism and indeterminism.
    George Musser, Scientific American, 1 Sep. 2015
  • And yet, despite the risks, Ademidun resides on the optimistic side of technological determinism.
    Robert Stevens, Fortune, 28 Dec. 2022
  • In a case of nominative determinism at its best, Parrott—a tall, bespectacled righty from southern California—was a first-round draft pick of the Orioles.
    Jon Tayler, SI.com, 18 June 2019
  • By casting a cross-section of Britons from different classes, the series of TV productions set out to obtain documentary proof of class determinism.
    Kyle Smith, National Review, 11 Jan. 2021
  • Kelvin Droegemeier great example of nominative determinism — where your name lines up with your job — as Kelvin is the name of a unit on the thermodynamic temperature scale (one Kelvin is equal to one degree on the Celsius scale).
    Umair Irfan, Vox, 1 Aug. 2018
  • Spider-Man in black was moodier and spookier; comics costumes tend toward that kind of visual determinism in general.
    Adam Rogers, WIRED, 3 July 2019
  • The Standard Version is a species of technological determinism, in which forms of society correspond to modes of production.
    George Scialabba, The New Republic, 1 Nov. 2021
  • But even they might be led astray by historical determinism: the presupposition of outcomes that representative data in the present has yet to reveal.
    Osita Nwanevu, The New Republic, 4 Sep. 2020
  • In her wonderful book Close to the Machine, author Ellen Ullman tells stories of technological determinism in action.
    Jennifer Granick, WIRED, 31 Jan. 2007
  • Moreover, with this formalism, the strict determinism implied by Einstein’s equations gives way to a quantum-like unpredictability.
    Quanta Magazine, 7 Apr. 2020
  • This doctrine, known as determinism, was advocated passionately by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, whom Einstein considered a great hero.
    Quanta Magazine, 10 Sep. 2015
  • A century ago the Bolshevik revolution was seen as an endorsement of Marx’s determinism.
    The Economist, 26 Oct. 2017
  • In this, Tsumura’s story resists the economic determinism of the American office novel, which tends to draw attention to the deadening employment ecosystem its characters are a part of.
    Apoorva Tadepalli, The Atlantic, 2 Apr. 2021
  • Technological determinism is perhaps the great intellectual temptation of our decade—try not to fall for it.
    Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic, 27 Apr. 2018
  • Hossenfelder’s commitment to determinism puts her in good company.
    John Horgan, Scientific American, 10 Mar. 2022
  • No matter how the climate determinism argument plays out, the new approach to history offers confirmation of climate’s outsized role in human affairs.
    Jacques Leslie, Wired, 15 Jan. 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'determinism.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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