alogism

Noun

alogism (countable and uncountable, plural alogisms)

1. An early 20th century movement in painting and writing, emerging from the Russian avant-garde, which made use of antirational or nonsensical elements.
   • His right eye was black; the left, for some strange reason (alogism), green. Black eyebrows, but (alogism) one higher that the other. In short a foreigner (alogism).1974, Canadian Slavonic Papers - Volume 16, page 5
   • The formal composition in all of these works done in the style of alogism is structured with mathematical precision approaching that of a blueprint.2000, Nina Gurianova, Exploring Color: Olga Rozanova and the Early Russian Avant-garde, 1910-1918, →ISBN, page 95
2. An absurd or nonsensical element deliberately added to a work that belongs to the alogism movement.
   • The theatricality of logic is, then, at least as effective in such speeches as are the meanderings of many an avant-garde playwright whose comic alogisms tend, sometime, to detract from the gravity of the situation described.1968, The Cresset - Volume 32, Issue 1, page 9
   • In the puppet show he also found the style of discourse of the puppet-show barker, which breaks into the course of the action, with its tones of ironic publicity and praise, its alogisms and deliberate absurdities.1976, Henryk Baran, Semiotics and Structuralism: Readings from the Soviet Union, page 288
3. Irrationality; the rejection of logical thinking as a means of approaching truth.
   • Dialectics degenerates into its contrary (as it does later in neo-Hegelian irrationalism), into alogism.1976, Bernard Bykhovskii, Kierkegaard, →ISBN, page 10
   • Mere logism does not do justice to the import of being, and alogism does not do justice to the forms of thought. The former leads to formalism, the latter to arbitrariness.1981, Paul Tillich, The System of the Sciences According to Objects and Methods, →ISBN
4. An irrational statement or line of argument; a logical error.
   • so the pen of Moses, of which the former may be regarded as in some manner symbolical, will confound all the physical sophisms and alogisms which have been advanced, in contradiction or perversion of the record which that pen was commissioned to inscribe.1825, Granville Penn, A comparative estimate of the mineral and Mosaical geologies
   • The only means of discovering alogisms in thought is concrete dialectical analysis of reality reflected in the utterance.1990, Alexander Spirkin, Fundamentals of Philosophy, page 238
5. An inconsistency or arbitrary situation that follows no logical pattern.
   • Thus, in order to develop a system or automatic monitoring of the results of observations abourt the vessels of the GUGMS, it was necessary to conduct a statistical analysis of the data in the operational regions for the purpose of determining locally uniform regions, with respect to variability of...1974, Evgeniĭ Panteleĭmonovich Borisenkov, A Dyubkin, Automation of the collection and analysis of scientific information in the problem of the interaction of the atmosphere and ocean, volume 801
   • From the multitude of his "equivalent thoughts" a person may, depending on his psychological "attitude," select and combine the most “comfortable” ones, tolerating the rest as unavoidable alogisms that must be circumvented if they cannot merely be swept aside.1991, Lydia Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose, →ISBN, page 268