This sounds very much like my concept of "formality": an expression is
formal if its meaning is independent of its context. Replace "meaning" by
"truth" and you have Bruce's absolutism. The advantage of my formality
concept (which I developed in collaboration with the linguist Jean-Marc
Dewaele) is that it is a continuous variable (there are degrees of
formality or context-dependence) which is to some degree measurable for
natural language. This leads to lots of interesting observations. E.g. as
could be expected, scientific texts are more formal than novels, which are
more formal than conversations, etc. The language of men, introverts and
academics is more formal than the one of women, extroverts and people with
a lower education. Speeches addressed to a large audience are more formal
than speeches addressed to a small audience, etc.
See:
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/defform.html
file://ftp.vub.ac.be/pub/projects/Principia_Cybernetica/Papers_Heylighen/For
mality_of_Language.txt
>Absolutist is not the same as insisting on "crisp" boundries and
>definitions.
In fact, my concept of formality includes both context-independence and
precision or "crispness", but notes that these are intrinsically different
dimensions. Although in every-day language context-dependence and fuzziness
tend to occur together, they do not always do that. Counterexamples are
poetry (very context-dependent, yet crisp), and political or bureaucratic
language (very fuzzy, but rather context-independent).
I don't think "absolutism" is such a bad term, in the sense that it is
normally used in opposition to "relativism", which means that the truth is
relative (to something which we may call "context"). Like Bruce's, my
philosophy is pragmatic, and assumes that "absolutism-relativism" is a
continuous scale, and that some things (e.g. mathematical formalisms) lie
closer to the "absolute" pole, while others (e.g. judments about
something's esthetic value) are nearer to the "relative" pole, but that
neither pole is in practice ever reached. Nothing is completely independent
of context: even for mathematical formalisms, we need in practice to
specify procedures for determining the elements of the formalism which are
not part of the formalism itself. Nothing is completely dependent on
context either, because that would mean that each time we encounter it (by
definition in a new context), it would be so different we would not
recognize it as the same thing.
________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Francis Heylighen, Systems Researcher fheyligh@vnet3.vub.ac.be
PESP, Free University of Brussels, Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium
Tel +32-2-6292525; Fax +32-2-6292489; http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html