Potter Stewart test
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English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
After Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who said "I know it when I see it" in regard to hardcore pornography.
Proper noun[edit]
- The informal test of identifying something based on whether one intuitively feels it belongs to a certain category.
- 2001 Bridges and Boundaries: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations
- It may not be easy to give a precise, categorical, practical definition of "doing justice to the past," but the concept passes the Potter Stewart test on pornography — we recognize it when we see it or fail to see it, or at least are convinced that we do.
- 2007 American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation
- While I continue to believe more in the Potter Stewart test, I thing [sic] Professor Feldman is to be commended for trying to impose some order on the chaos of religion and government, and I am grateful to him for discussing these issues with me
- 2012 The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe
- For example, astrology and phrenology were once considered sciences and only later were cast out as pseudoscientific, so they clearly at one time passed the Potter Stewart test.
- 2001 Bridges and Boundaries: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations