hairsplitting's Usage Examples:

This dialectic, initiated by Euclides, became more and more opposed to the testimony of experience; in the hands of Eubulides and Alexinus it degenerated into hairsplitting, mainly in the form of the reductio ad absurdum.

In every branch of human effort the mania for hairsplitting and classification is harmful and even impossible, as in the attempt to distinguish between practice and science!Hairsplitting, even when mischievous in intent, leads to distinctions of value.

But nominalism was powerless to inspire theology with new life; on the contrary, its intervention only increased the inextricable tangle of the hairsplitting questions with which theology busied itself, and made their solution more and more impossible.

Synonyms:

precise, finespun,

Antonyms:

general, indistinct, inexact, unrefined,