Noun opposite of a theoretician?

What do you call someone who is concerned with / active in practice and application rather than theory? That is, what is the noun opposite of "theoretician"?

I've looked on thesaurus.com, WordHippo.com, PowerThesaurus.com and synonyms.com, but to no avail.

Notes:

• Adjectives won't do. So, "practical", "applied", "applicative" are not what I'm after.

Solution 1:

Consider practitioner which is defined here as

A person actively engaged in an art, discipline, or profession, especially medicine.

Solution 2:

You might consider pragmatist

Defined by Oxford Lexico as:

1 A person who is guided more by practical considerations than by ideals.

And Cambridge defines pragmatism as:

the quality of dealing with a problem in a sensible way that suits the conditions that really exist, rather than following fixed theories, ideas, or rules.

Solution 3:

If we conjugate "practice" into a noun like we do "theory", we get a practician - someone who tends to engage in practical work (rather than theoretical work).

So, that kind of fits, but it is a bit obscure on its own, and I doubt it sees a lot of use, so other answers are also welcome.

Solution 4:

In certain situations you may also speak of a

hands-on person

i.e. a person who does something practically (and pro-actively), as opposed to only theorizing about it.

I admit that this is not the best match for what you are looking for. It is rather yet another word from the general semantic field here.

Solution 5:

I agree with @SvenYargs in the comments:

empiricist

Although the definition that better fits this context is probably (via Merriam-Webster):

the practice of relying on observation and experiment especially in the natural sciences

One can distinguish between theoretical and empirical sources for scientific evidence.

In this dichotomy, the theoretician is taking a more rationalist perspective (for an example of a paper taking this persepective see here), but I think it is inappropriate to expect to apply that pure dichotomy from epistemology to a typical practicing scientist. Instead, one should consider these as shared aspects of the philosophy of science rather than the philosophy of epistemology.

Rather, a theoretician is of the type that focuses on the theoretical approach; that doesn't mean they reject empirical evidence, but they may tend to be skeptical of evidence that is not grounded in theory (that is, one needs to be able to develop a predictive theory to interpret evidence in a meaningful way).

Similarly, used in context, an empiricist is not someone who thinks theoretical work is not "real" but rather they focus on empirical evidence in their work (that is, they may use theory to drive an experiment but the deciding factor is supportive experimental evidence).

For another example, Monaghan, F. V., & Corcos, A. F. (1985). Mendel, the empiricist. Journal of Heredity, 76(1), 49-54. use the theoretician/empiricist dichotomy to position the work of Gregor Mendel. Google scholar can suggest several other articles in which to find this dichotomy.

I would consider "experimentalist" to be a synonym, as well, which also fits well with the adjectives used for say, an experimental vs. theoretical physicist.