Talk:purpose

From WT:RFC
The definitions are weak. &mdash; Paul G 12:31, 23 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Done. Vildricianus 19:30, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Which objects can have purpose
Some quotations from Google Books showing what kind of objects can have purpose, at least lexically: More can be found; this is a start. Dan Polansky (talk) 12:42, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
 * The Purpose of Suffering
 * The purpose of God
 * The Purpose of Life
 * The Purpose of Existence
 * The Purpose of Man
 * The Purpose of Design
 * The Purpose of the Church
 * The purpose of painting
 * The purpose of it all
 * The Purpose of the Gospels
 * The Purpose of Ethics
 * The Purpose of History
 * the purpose of creation
 * the purpose of morality
 * The Purpose of Banking
 * The Purpose of Libraries
 * The Purpose of Power
 * The Purpose of the Dance
 * The Purpose of Death
 * the Purpose of Politics
 * The Purpose of Profit
 * the purpose of our efforts
 * The purpose of this investigation
 * the purpose of art
 * the purpose of your job
 * the purpose of your courtship
 * the purpose of your research
 * the purpose of your statement
 * the purpose of your visit
 * the purpose of your request
 * the purpose of your committee
 * the purpose of your speech
 * the purpose of your proposal
 * the purpose of your inquiry
 * the purpose of an artifact
 * the purpose of your action

Man-made objects (artifacts) with a purpose
Man-made objects can have a purpose per Talk:multipurpose: building, dam, device, helicopter, tool, robot, and vehicle. GNV reveals written things can have a purpose: act, book, law, bill, document, statute.

Ref:
 * Written things:
 * Written things:

--Dan Polansky (talk) 09:57, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

Collocations
Some nice collocation dictionaries: Macmillan, cambridge.org. Macmillan uses the format that I used to use when I entered items like "Adjectives often used with", where I did not enter the collocations but merely the modifying parts. Cambridge.org lists complete collocations full with example sentences: this format is not fit for Wiktionary mainspace. This presents huge amount of work: someone has to pick the collocations (there are quite many) and pick the example sentences from corpora. If we wanted, we could add these as Further reading. Dan Polansky (talk) 13:13, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

New definition of sense 1
I made a bigger change to definition 1, so I will leave a note. I changed it from
 * An objective to be reached; a target; an aim; a goal.

to
 * The end for which an action or activity is done, an endeavor is undertaken, an artifact or its feature is made or an entity exists.

My reason for doing so was the frustration with trying to understand the senses. For one thing, a list of synonyms does not help clarification much. For another thing, this makes it seem like objective is a synonym ("to be reached" does not do any differentia work), but it is only an imperfect one: artifacts have purposes but usually not objectives. Furthermore, I expanded the definition to cover which kinds of things can have purposes, which I find very helpful for trying to understand the senses. Dictionaries usually do not do that, but they do says "is made, done or exists" or similar, so they do a little bit of that. I believe listing the entity types is rather helpful.

Why do we need "an entity exists"? It is because lexically, people assign purposes to things that are not artifacts made, and we need to cover this. "entity" is really broad so it covers everything that does not fit in the previous items. I saw the verb "exists" in one of the dictionaries. --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:31, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

A genus-free definition:
 * That which something is for.

All the semantic work is done by the preposition "for". It is not a real proposal, just a point of contrast. It is genus free since the genus is really thing, the root of ontology. It emphasizes that the preposition "for" does a lot of semantic work in various candidate definitions. --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:44, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

My purpose in X is Y, my purpose is X
I find the form "My purpose in X is Y" noteworthy. In it, it is not the action/artifact X that has a purpose but rather the agent of the action or the maker of the artifact; grammatically, the purpose is contained in the action/artifact. Whether this creates a separate sense is less clear: multiple dictionaries do not create a separate sense. One can rephrase "My purpose in X is Y" as "The purpose of X, of which I am the agent or make, is Y", and be back to the main sense.

Sometimes, it is not even "My purpose in" but rather "My purpose is X" without explicit reference to the action of which X is the purpose; whether this is more indicative of a separate sense is unclear. One can rephrase as "The purpose of the action/artifact that is in the context, of which I am the agent or maker, is X".

Some quotations from Wikisource:
 * My purpose in writing separately is to emphasize that the Court's holding in effect rejects the argument that this governmental entity-the Tribe-is completely immune from legal process.
 * My purpose in this letter has merely been to call attention to this family, which has impressed me all my life as one of great interest.
 * My purpose in making this digression was, as I said, to point out into what trifles the second childhood of genius is too apt to be betrayed;
 * I have well considered the subject, and propose to accomplish my purpose in this manner.
 * My purpose was to admit no testimony of living authors, that I might not be misled by partiality, and that none of my contemporaries might have reason to complain;
 * It has been my purpose to illustrate rather than to explain. Dan Polansky (talk) 10:00, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Other dictionaries
For what it's worth, looking at other dictionaries, they have noun senses amounting to: - -sche (discuss) 03:31, 18 August 2022 (UTC)
 * 1) An aim, an object, an intention; the reason for which something is done, is created, or exists.
 * Webster 1913 noun sense 1: "That which a person sets before himself as an object to be reached or accomplished; the end or aim to which the view is directed in any plan, measure, or exertion; view; aim; design; intention; plan. [...] As my eternal purpose hath decreed (Milton)"
 * Century noun sense 1: "A thing proposed or intended; an object to be kept in view or subserved in any operation or course of action; end proposed; aim. [...] to what purpose they built Castles so near", also Century noun sense 5: "Import; meaning; purport; intent. The intent and purpose of the law [...]"
 * Modern MW noun sense 1a; Dictionary.com noun senses 1 and 2; Lexico noun sense 1; Oxford Learner's Dictionary noun sense 1; Cambridge noun sense 1.
 * Compare/contrast Dictionary.com's separate noun sense (5) for "practical result, effect [...] act to good purpose"
 * 1) Resoluteness, determination; (sense of) having a reason for existing or doing things.
 * Modern MW noun sense 1b; Dictionary.com noun sense 3; Lexico noun sense 1.1; Oxford Learner's Dictionary noun senses 3 (for [volunteering gives her] a sense of purpose) and 4 (for confidence and strength of purpose); Cambridge noun sense 2 (for strength of purpose, sense of purpose).
 * 1) The subject at hand, at issue, or under discussion.
 * Modern MW noun sense 2; Dictionary.com noun sense 4.
 * 1)  Proposal, proposition, point to be considered.
 * Webster 1913 noun sense 2: "Proposal to another; discourse. [Obs.] Spenser."
 * Century noun sense 2: "†Proposition; proposal; point to be considered or acted upon. [...] And therefore have we / Our written purposes before us sent; / Which, if thou hast consider'd, let us know / If 'twill tie up thy discontented sword. (Shak.)"
 * 1) * 1623, William Shakespeare, :
 * And therefore have we / Our written purposes before us sent; / Which, if thou hast consider'd, let us know / If 'twill tie up thy discontented sword.
 * Century also has another noun sense, "Hence. 3 Intended or desired effect; practical advantage or result; use; subject or matter in hand; question at issue: as, you speak to the purpose. [...] It is to small purpose to have an erected face towards heaven, and a perpetual grovelling spirit upon the earth. (Bacon)"
 * 1)  Discourse, conversation.
 * Century noun sense 6: "Discourse; conversation. For she in pleasaunt purpose did abound, [...]"
 * 1)  Instance, example.
 * Webster 1913 noun sense 3: "Instance; example. [Obs.] L'Estrange."
 * Century noun sense 7: "† Instance; example."
 * 1) Century also has "8†. pl. A sort of conversational game. Compare cross-purpose, 2."
 * 2) and Century has "9†. A dance resembling a cotillion, a characteristic feature of which was the introduction of confidential or coquettish conversation."
 * 3) Some dictionaries also consider there to be a sense "need, requirement (typically one limited in scope, temporary, or otherwise particular)", for things like "considered income for tax purposes", "originally built for commercial purposes", "it will serve our purposes".
 * Lexico noun sense 1.2; Oxford Learner's Dictionary noun sense 2; Cambridge noun sense 3
 * Impressive. One quibble I have is with the use of intention as a synonym of the main sense: . The candidate synonyms of aim and object seem less suspect, but I would need to make a deeper analysis. --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:48, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

Intention as a synonym of the main sense
M-W has intention as a synonym of their main sense of purpose directly in their definition. As far as I can tell, this is incorrect.

The main sense currently reads "The end for which something is done, is made or exists", which is close to what Lexico and Collins have.

A simple formula is that people have intentions whereas actions and man-made things have purposes.

I see two main situations that illustrate the contrast between purpose and intention: In the first situation, Y is the intention of X while Z is the purpose of Y. In the second situation, "to make Y" is the intention of X while Z is the purpose of Y. It is not true that Z is the intention of Y, at least in the most customary use of intention. As an example, a person intends to visit the country, and someone asks, what is the purpose of the visit? I don't think they would ask *what is the intention of the visit. At the same time, Z is the intended outcome of Y or "make Y", which may lend itself to the idea that Z could be the intention of Y, but I find no evidence supporting the idea.
 * X intends to do Y to achieve or do Z
 * X intends to make Y to serve Z

Both intention and purpose are primarily relation nouns rather than entity type nouns; they indicate a relationship in which one entity stands to another. (For example, person is an entity type noun whereas brother is a relation noun.) Therefore, their mismatch in relations indicated above is a good indicator of failed synonymy. Both words have to do with intentionality, but they refer to different roles in relations.

There is a translation table for the currently RFV-nominated sense "A result that is desired; an intention", which for Czech (úmysl) and German (Intention, Absicht) appear not to fit the word purpose. The translation table gloss reads "intention". There is a chance that the translations were entered only based on the translation gloss and are incorrect; the table can be removed if the RFV-nominated sense fails. --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:54, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

Searches: --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:38, 23 August 2022 (UTC)
 * - intention is rare
 * - intention not found
 * - intention is rare
 * - intention is rare

The whole picture is a bit more complicated: --Dan Polansky (talk) 15:53, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
 * One of the senses of intention is goal or purpose, exemplified by the following: . By contrast, "intention of the visit" is rare as per above. Thus, intention is a partial synonym of the main sense of purpose.
 * People can have purposes whereas my simplified formula was that people have intentions while actions and man-made things have purposes:
 * - my purpose is not less common than my intention
 * At least some of the above refers to one's purpose in life, which can be argued to be covered by the main sense: the end for which something (or actually someone) exists. As in: "If immortality is our purpose, is technology the means by which we will achieve it?", "My purpose is to excel in my career and somehow use that career to help other people." or "My purpose is to be a present and supportive husband, a loving father who is available and kind at all times." Other examples are an organization's purpose: "Our purpose is to provide insurance products and related services to help people achieve and sustain their financial well-being." These uses are not perfect synonyms of "intention": while such purposes are surely intended, "intention" seems much weaker. Another use is like this: "In this chapter, my purpose is to focus on various measures of the quality of democracy and to test the hypothesis by comparing the means of explanatory and dependent variables at different levels of national IQ." Here, my purpose is the purpose of this chapter.
 * Some of the "my purpose" uses match OED:purpose sense 1 a; our main sense (the end for which something is done, made or exists) is OED:purpose sense 2. And OED uses intention in the definition of sense 1 a.
 * Some of the "my purpose" uses match OED:purpose sense 1 a; our main sense (the end for which something is done, made or exists) is OED:purpose sense 2. And OED uses intention in the definition of sense 1 a.

Some more Ngram searches to differentiate purpose from intention: I used multipliers to achieve similar curve levels in the graphs. They do not conclusively show anything about synonymy, but at least suggest marked differences in usage. --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:33, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

Verb created in the definition of the main sense
The current definition reads "The end for which something is done, is made or exists." I wonder whether verb created would be required for the main sense, in addition to made. A case in point could be the one for books: the writer of a book creates it while the maker produces a copy. Real usage shows books have purposes and the purpose of a book is the purpose the writer had in mind, not the purpose the maker/manufacturer had in mind. On the other hand, suggests make could perhaps be also used to refer to the act of creating the information object that a book is (writing it), but I am not sure. If so, the case for created would not be compelling. The verb created is in Lexico. There could be other arguments for created. The verb made is in Collins, which has a similar definition as the one we currently have. Dan Polansky (talk) 07:46, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

The genus reason for the main sense
The current definition reads "The end for which something is done, is made or exists." Multiple dictionaries use reason as the genus of the main sense, whereas I used end to emphasize means-end relationship; end is not an entity type noun but rather relation noun, so it is a pseudo-genus, but seems to work. It would be reason in the sense of motive. That is not wrong, but seems suboptimal to me, suggesting a full synonymy between purpose and reason that does not seem to be there. Consider "he had good reasons for doing so"; one would not say "he had good purposes for doing so". One may argue that reason is really a hypernym and not a synonym and that the rest of the definition serves as differentia. If that is so, we should be able to replace a hyponym with the hypernym, but we would not say "the reason of the book is to elucidate X". And "the reason of the visit" is fairly rare:. But reason for the visit with for is common, suggesting that the holder of the reason is the agent, and the agent has the reason for the action; the action does not have or own a reason. People have reasons for actions, actions have purposes and man-made objects have purposes. The primary holders of reasons are people. On the other hand, by the same token, end is a misfit since we would not say "the end of the book" to mean this, and probably not the end of an action. Of note, for security purposes seems synonymous with for security reasons, supporting reason:. But when we compare "used for military purposes" with "used for military reasons", the latter seems much less common and to mean something slightly different; "used for military ends" exists but is fairly rare. ; . One might argue that the genus does not matter all that much and that the semantics is delivered by the preposition for. Dan Polansky (talk) 12:02, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

Relation to goal
Some sources indicate goal to be a synonym of purpose. If so, it is not a perfect synonym. Man-made things have a purpose but usually not a goal. A goal is something to be met, to make progress on, and to complete. The purpose of a man-made thing is not made progress on and is not completed; it is a certain kind of use or function that the thing serves.

Ref:
 * - the goal collocations are often not of the building itself, like "goal of a building site evaluation"

WordNet has node "purpose, intent, intention, aim, design", of which the direct hypernym is "goal, end"; goal would be the hypernym of purpose. But it would possibly be the hypernym of purpose of an action since WordNet also has node "function, purpose, role, use", whose direct hypernym is "utility, usefulness" and which is exemplified by "the function of an auger is to bore holes". It would seem WordNet differentiates purpose of an action and purpose of an artifact as two nodes. As long as Wiktionary does not differentiate and says that purpose is something for which something is done or made, goal is not a suitable hypernym. I view the WordNet analysis with a bit of suspicion since I don't believe purpose is a synonym of intention in the main use of intention.

Recently, the main sense read "An objective to be reached; a target; an aim; a goal", which would suggest goal is a perfect synonym or else it has no place to seek on the definition like. As said, I don't believe that to be correct, but it is not entirely incorrect. --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:23, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

Czech and German for purpose, intention and goal
Some sources indicate purpose, intention and goal to be synonyms. I don't think so. That does not work for Czech and German, for which the three terms map as follows: The Czech terms are not synonyms and neither are the German ones. All three belong to intentionality and goal-seeking but that alone does not make them synonyms. If the English terms are to be synonyms, something strange must be going on here. For intention, I tried to articulate the difference in. --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:23, 22 August 2022 (UTC)
 * purpose: účel, Zweck
 * intention: úmysl, Absicht
 * goal: cíl, Ziel

purpose
Rfv-sense: A result that is desired; an intention.

What quotations of use substantiate this sense as anything other than sense 1:
 * The end for which an action or activity is done, an endeavor is undertaken, an artifact or its feature is made or an entity exists.

I see that there is a corresponding translation table with different translations; could the translations be most fitting to the word "intention" rather than "purpose"? It seems to be so for Czech. Multiple dictionaries do not seem to have two senses like these; M-W does not. --Dan Polansky (talk) 15:50, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Welcome back, Dan. I tend to agree that there is some redundancy in the definitions, I also think that the first definition is needlessly arcane. I think we should rewrite it more simply, something along the lines of "The reason for which a thing is made or is done." Senses 2,3,4 and 6 are perhaps subordinate to this sense, or else totally redundant to the sense. - TheDaveRoss  13:15, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Definitions often need to overlap to cover the range of meaning in actual usage. When we write simple definitions, it seems to tempt contributors to add more specific ones that don't seem to clearly be covered by the simple definition. Subsense structures sometimes address the issue. I think it helps that definitions not have too many elements and that each element be unambiguously supported by more than one citation.
 * In this case, definition 1 seems overly long (ie, have too many elements) and may well include others of the definitions. MWOnline has three definitions, which adds to my skepticism about our seven. Only one of our definitions is fully attested.
 * I also note that we lack the use of purpose as used in some descriptions of the functioning of organisms where the meaning is "function" as there is no one evident that has the purpose.
 * I doubt that RfDs and RfVs of individual definitions can address the problems with the entry. DCDuring (talk) 16:19, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I like the new arcane definition, but I see that people may want to see it simplified. I would be sorry to see it go, but I am only one person. I really like how it explicates the kind of entities to which purpose applies. As for "The reason for which a thing is made or is done", I don't like the genus "reason" and prefer "end", which M-W has together with "object". Furthermore, "made or done" does not cover "exists", which I see as a problem since purposes are lexically assigned to things neither made nor done. I posted some reasoning about the new definition at Talk:purpose.
 * The RFD-nominated sense of intention could be kept if we assign the example "It has been my purpose to illustrate rather than to explain" to it, but I am not sure we should; there is more at Talk:purpose. --Dan Polansky (talk) 16:36, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I think there is an interesting philosophical question there - can a thing have a purpose if it merely exists without having been made? But that is not in the scope of this project. - TheDaveRoss  17:43, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Exactly right. And to avoid the philosophical question, we allow "exists" just like one of the dictionaries does, just to be on the safe side, to cover all uses, even those uses that a proper philosophical analysis would declare dubious. On Talk:purpose, I posted a list of things that are implied to have purpose, on phrase level. By the way, are organizations "made" or "created"? And is art "made" or "created"? This is why I picked so many entity types and verbs. --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:54, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
 * To wit: "Although the purpose of wings is to fly, they are structurally different. The wings of bats consist of skin that fills between the very elongated finger bones." Are bat wings made? They can be analyzed as "made" by evolution by natural selection, but do we need to make that analysis? Since wings are not really made by grow; they are "made" by cell division processes. --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:01, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I think there's some conceptual confusion going on, as that seems to be a separate question (and covered by sense 8). I think there are three concepts here, which are all intertwined. Roughly:
 * Intention (the will expressed in carrying out an action) - currently sense 2.
 * Reason (the justification for that action) - currently sense 5.
 * Role (the function of an action/object) - currently sense 8.
 * can refer to all three in separate ways:
 * "My purpose in X is Y" neatly separates intention from reason. X is the intention, while Y is the reason.My purpose in this letter has merely been to call attention to this family can be rewritten as "My intention in this letter has merely been to call attention to this family". You could of course write "My reason for this letter has merely been to call attention to this family", but that isn't quite the same thing. One is raw intention, while the other is the justification for that intention.
 * It's quite clear that something can have a role without that role having been instated with intention. I don't think we need to get bogged down in the philosophy of it, as the current gloss is adequate.
 * As a result, I think it's actually sense 1 that's superfluous, which should make it straightforward to cite sense 2. Sense 1 currently reads: The end for which an action or activity is done, an endeavor is undertaken, an artifact or its feature is made or an entity exists. This tries to cover all three at once, and as a result it comes off as conceptually muddled and difficult to interpret. In fact, without this discussion I'm not sure I'd have been able to interpret it at all. Theknightwho (talk) 18:57, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Can’t we simplify the definition of sense 1 to “An end intended to be served by something”? --Lambiam 19:10, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
 * That goes too far in deontologizing the definition, failing to show what that something could be. At least say "The end for which something is done, made or exists"; that at least hints at entity types that have purpose by the used verbs, and is reasonably short and simple. I ontologized the definition a lot, which is unusual and it seems people don't like; I do.
 * About intention being the lead sense: not to me. The lead sense of purpose is that which something is for and involves means-end relationship, whereas the lead sense of intention is the course of action intended, with means-end relationship not involved. M-W seems to disagree, though. The second sense of intention does involve means-end, which complicates the analysis. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:32, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
 * DCDuring added sense "Function, role", with beautiful quotations. This would be the "exists" part in "end for which something is done, made or exists" or as-if made. It would be an implied end or an as-if, but still a kind of end. E.g. "The purpose of the gall-bladder is obviously to permit the accumulation of bile". gall-bladder's design was created by a design-like process of natural selection which tends to create purpose-like things. Thus, the objects of biology are interpreted as if made with a purpose, and indeed, the implied or as-if purpose permeates biology even though some philosophers don't like it. I am not convinced this has to be a separate sense. What do we do with "the purpose of the universe" if we assume that the universe was not made with a purpose? We have to let language users interpret things as if made with a purpose even when it is philosophically rather dubious. The quotations are beautiful, in any case. Are there any external references that we could use to support the sense, to add to our internal deliberations? --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:33, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
 * In the common senses, it seems to me that a person can have a purpose in the sense of what the person intends and that the objects of such intent have the purpose of the intender. There is also the feeling of purpose. These three are the senses in most common use, for which we need to have definitions that are clear and relatively simple. What doesn't fit under these are the relatively uncommon uses of purpose as applied to things that do not form intentions and are not the object of the intention of persons. We could argue that such usages are error, crypto-theism, or habitual vestiges of theistic thinking. We could dispense with a definition for this last, but only if we make the first two definitions I refer to more complicated or force the reader to include personified God, Nature, Evolution, of the Invisible Hand as persons. DCDuring (talk) 21:16, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Seeing the opinions above, I have changed the def to "The end for which something is done, is made or exists." It is close to the def in Lexico but "reason" was changed to "end", which hints at "means-end" relationship. I kept "exists", which is supported by Lexico and AHD. If someone feels strongly enough about removing "exists", I won't object: things that were not made but are implied to have purpose will have to be interpreted as if made. If someone feels strongly that "reason" is better than "end", go ahead: it is supported by some dictionaries; I don't like it but I can't exactly say why; I feel "reason" is not synonymous enough to purpose ("He had good reasons for doing so" but not "He had good purposes for doing so"), while "end" is in "ends justify the means". I added some public domain quotes as usexes to show that man-made things can have purposes: usexes have no visual identification noise and are not hidden, which is very useful for gaining an overview of use. --Dan Polansky (talk) 06:15, 18 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Just noting I have cited the sense "(obsolete) The subject of discourse; the point at issue." which was tagged, with help from Century which alerted me to collocations. I note that neither Merriam-Webster (which has it as one of just two noun senses they deign to cover) nor Dictionary.com mark it as obsolete, as we do; we should see if modern citations exist... - -sche (discuss) 09:20, 18 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Also, it seems possible to add something like "; the reason for the present discourse" to the definition, to make the connection to the noun's primary sense. - -sche (discuss) 16:45, 18 August 2022 (UTC)


 * I agree with Dan (or with what I think Dan's stance is, above) that the "Function, role" sense does not seem separate from the main sense (although I did notice Century has a comparable sense in their Supplement, saying it's used in biology without reference to intentionality), "the purpose of the gallbladder" is "the reason it exists" whether or not anyone thinks it is also "the reason it was created" by anyone with intentionality; it's why, when early forms of it evolved through random mutation etc, it survived natural selection and evolved further. I think it should be made a subsense of sense 1 (or maybe merged into it). - -sche (discuss)


 * I am inclined to expand our "Resolution; determination" sense to "Resolution; determination; (sense of having a) reason for existing or doing things", to better cover things like saying volunteering or  (and in line with some other dictionaries). - -sche (discuss) 16:45, 18 August 2022 (UTC)
 * That last extension seems to me to be rather distinct. It seems to be very close to "meaning" or "meaningfulness". Perhaps purpose is a particular kind of meaning. A common collocation for the "resolution/determination" sense is (do/say something) with purpose, synonymously purposively or purposefully. The emphasis is on the intention of the doer. Your examples are of the collocation give (someone/something) purpose. In these cases the purpose is often something lacking in a person which is found externally. Emotionally these seem very different.
 * I don't see the advantage of confining our criteria for recognizing distinct senses to distinct instances of formal logic. DCDuring (talk) 17:10, 18 August 2022 (UTC)
 * About meaning: the phrases purpose of life and meaning of life seem to refer to the same thing or almost the same thing. This suggests there would be synonymy of meaning and purpose in some sense, but this does not seem to be the case for the main sense of purpose: "what is the meaning of your visit" does not work. A similar term is meaning of art, which could be synonymous with purpose of art; . The associated German terms could be Sinn and Bedeutung, which incidentally also have the same sense of "semantics; word or sentence meaning"; Czech is smysl but not účel, which is the lead Czech translation of the main sense of purpose. Another term is meaning of history and purpose of history:, . A synonym could be import, but I am not sure; another candidate is significance. meaningfulness is not a synonym for these kinds of phrases: it is not an answer to the question what does it mean?
 * In defense of DCDuring's "function, role", WordNet has item "function, purpose, role, use", which supports DCDuring's sense as a separate notion. I do not feel compelled to support a merge or subsensing at this point; WordNet probably has better notion/concept engineering than lexicographical dictionaries, and I see some plausibility in having "function, role" as a separate sense". --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:23, 19 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Ok, I'm persuaded that "function, role" can be a separate (sub)sense. And I'm detagging "The subject of discourse; the point at issue." as it's cited, unless anyone would like to dispute the interpretation of the cites. - -sche (discuss) 19:06, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

"Conversation"; "example"
The primary sense RFV'd by Dan, "A result that is desired; an intention", can be considered failed at this point. There are still no citations for it and half a year on there's no consensus for how to distinguish it from sense 1, so I've removed it accordingly. I don't find TKW's distinction between "reason for" and "intention" above convincing or at any rate lexically salient, and it doesn't seem to have been taken up in the discussion above.

That leaves the tags for the obsolete "conversation" and "example" senses. The first is tricky to find but should be citable. The latter is more problematic: the early modern phrase for the purpose does mean "for example", but I'm not satisfied that within the phrase "purpose" itself means "example"; it's being used in another sense, i.e. "here is an example for the purpose at hand". This seems clearer in some other cases, e.g. "Well then, for the purpose: ...". The OED also treats it as an obsolete fixed phrase and not an obsolete sense of purpose itself. I would only consider this cited if people can find an example where it means this outside of that fixed phrase, otherwise an entry should just be made for the phrase as a whole. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 19:11, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

RFV Failed for all RFV'd senses Ioaxxere (talk) 19:56, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

Rfv-sense: "(transitive, passive) To design for some purpose." Does this exist distinctly from passive use of the preceding sense 1? - -sche (discuss) 03:10, 18 August 2022 (UTC)


 * PS: because RQ-templated quotes don't include the year anywhere visible in wikitext (to enable sorting them into the right chronological place when adding other quotes), I just added some other quotes (to sense 1) after the RQ. - -sche (discuss) 03:15, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

RFV Failed Ioaxxere (talk) 19:56, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

RFD discussion: August 2022–February 2023
Rfd-sense: The reason for which something is done, or the reason it is done in a particular way.

This sense is redundant to sense 1. I have just changed sense 1 from
 * An objective to be reached; a target; an aim; a goal.

to
 * The end for which an action or activity is done, an endeavor is undertaken, an artifact or its feature is made or an entity exists.

so it is now even clearer than it was before that this is redundant. I have checked multiple dictionaries to see whether these could be different senses, and I do not see that. --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:20, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I doubt that you could find citations that unambiguously support each element of your rewritten definition 1. See WT:RFVE for more. DCDuring (talk) 16:26, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

The definition of the main sense now reads "The end for which something is done, is made or exists." I still maintain that the RFD-nominated definition is redundant and should be removed. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:26, 19 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Deleted, uncited and redundant. - -sche (discuss) 22:35, 4 January 2023 (UTC)
 * While I am glad the sense is gone, my position has been that at least two delete votes are required to establish consensus, which did not happen here; the vote of the closer does not count toward that tally unless the closer voted previously. Would anyone consider posting an additional delete vote? --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:19, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
 * I don't necessarily agree with Dan's position, but if this discussion was still properly open I would vote delete, so I'm marking it as closed now. &mdash; excarnateSojourner (talk &middot; contrib) 22:26, 5 February 2023 (UTC)