Definition of "pregiven"
pregiven
adjective
comparative more pregiven, superlative most pregiven
Naturally occurring, as opposed to being socially constructed.
Quotations
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.
2017, Stephan van Erp, Christiane Alpers, Christopher Cimorelli, Salvation in the World: The Crossroads of Public Theology
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).
2018, Morris Zelditch, Status, Power, and Legitimacy, page 65
Provided beforehand; present at the start.
Quotations
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.
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
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.
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
noun
uncountable
(philosophy, ontology) That which is actual, as opposed to our concepts or apprehension of the world.
Quotations
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.
2000, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Impetus and Equipoise in the Life-Strategies of Reason, page 266
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.
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