Prescriptive indicates usage or commonly accepted practices while proscriptive involves finding the solution. An example, many schools in the country have been lauded with imbuing high school level graduates with the equivalent of prescriptive medical school. This means that they are for the most part aware of the codified body of knowledge of medicine. Proscriptive knowledge involves the procedure of finding a cure or solution to a problem thus deterministically developing the presriptive body of knowledge. NASA has an unusual trick for producing innovative processes involving this categorization, that is, they often request the same solution to be produced where it is not known and cannot be found easily, thus repeating the creative or scientific processes involved in finding the solution or cure to a problem, often finding a different approach that is as useful and producing interesting results, a true empirical `cure` or `solution` would be resolvable a priori as the best and not merely the best practices, thus the advance of science does not distinguish between unknown and undiscovered possibilities.
14 May
jadeowl 