purposive

adj

1. Serving a particular purpose; useful; adapted to a given purpose, especially through natural evolution.

   “Irresistably it came to me again that beauty, far from being wasted, was purposive, that this purpose was of a redeeming kind, and that some one who was pleased co-operated with it for my personal benefit.”

   “As we saw in our discussion of the FAKE GUN example in chapter 19, there are natural dimensions to our categories for objects: […] purposive, based on the uses we can make of an object in a given situation.”

2. Done or performed with a conscious purpose or intent.

   “It would have been quite impossible to use the A vocabulary for literary purposes or for political or philosophical discussion. It was intended only to express simple, purposive thoughts, usually involving concrete objects or physical actions.”

   “Other ecclesiastics [...] were similarly accepting of a space for purposive and beneficent human action and betterment in a disenchanted world.”

3. Pertaining to purpose, as reflected in behaviour or mental activity.

   “Ursula could not believe the air in her nostrils. It seemed conscious, malevolent, purposive in its intense murderous coldness.”

   “The question at once arises whether medieval thinkers really believed that what we now call inanimate objects were sentient and purposive.”

4. Pertaining to or demonstrating purpose.

   “The world was generally agreed to be a purposive one, responsive to the wishes of its Creator […].”

5. Possessed of a firm purpose.

   “Whenever she opened a scientific book and saw whole paragraphs of incomprehensible words and symbols, she felt a sense of wonder at the great territories of learning that lay beyond her—the sum of so many noble and purposive attempts to make objective sense of the world.”

6. Of a clause or conjunction: expressing purpose.

   “Many scholars suggest that […] the increase in the use of the to-infinitive in Middle English took place at the expense of the bare infinitive (i.e. an infinitive without the marker to). […] due to the loss of verbal inflections, it became difficult to distinguish the infinitival form from other verbal forms. As a result […] to began to function as a mere marker of the infinitive, losing its original ‘purposive’ sense […]”

noun

1. (uncountable)A mood indicating a purpose of the course of activity expressed by the verb.

   “This purposive was described by speakers as referring to the action which can be observed at the moment of speech; this is why it is termed ‘visual’.”