His work, though formal and precise, displays an exceptional understanding of the limits and uses of formalism and precision.
Quotes about formalism (5 Quotes)
PURE FORMALISM as such, without attention to referential social axioms, is powerless to capture the relevance of many discourse grammatical functions.
The exercises of our meeting are to be simple and devoid of all ceremonial and formalism.
Far from creating a new formalism, what these can yield is something far transcending surface values since they not only embody form as beauty, but also form in which intuitions or ideas or conjectures have taken visible substance.
It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.