formalism
/ˈfɔːm(ə)lɪz(ə)m
/noun
1 [mass noun] Excessive adherence to prescribed forms: academic dryness and formalism...
- This inclination has developed the furthest in philosophy, political science, and economics, where most practitioners have adopted an otherworldly and self-referential formalism.
- I am not going to argue for the virtues of formalism.
- Fortunately, I grew out of the spell of legal formalism and its infantile over-simplifications.
1.1The basing of ethics on the form of the moral law without regard to intention or consequences.Analytic ethics has been very fairly impoverished given the postivist legacy of emotivism, the formalism of Kantian ethics and the technicalism of utilitarianism....
- They explicitly disavow the classical philosophies of formalism, logicism, Platonism, intuitionism, and social constructivism.
- Gadamer uses Kant's aesthetic formalism to illustrate this point.
1.2Concern or excessive concern with form and technique rather than content in artistic creation.Judd's thesis augured the inevitable evolution of Modern art into pure formalism and object-ness....
- In this way, neoclassicism's insistent formalism did little to close the gap between style and meaning.
- A slew of sculptors have emerged in Los Angeles in the last few years, but most seem stuck in either constrictive formalism or murky surrealism.
1.3(In the theatre) a symbolic and stylized manner of production.
1.4The treatment of mathematics as a manipulation of meaningless symbols.The other basic version of formalism likens the practice of mathematics to a game played with linguistic characters....
- He has also made this formalism more useful for practical calculations.
- Brouwer emphasizes, as he had done in his dissertation, that formalism presupposes contentual mathematics at the metalevel.
2A description of something in formal mathematical or logical terms: there is a formalism which expresses the idea of superposition...
- Yet the development of the general theory of relativity introduced Einstein to the power of abstract mathematical formalisms, notably that of tensor calculus.
- The Maximum Likelihood section provides the details of the mathematical formalisms and computations.
- Any attempt to disprove the theory of evolution using thermodynamics will require proper formalisms.
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