Key Thesis
When context is not explicitly specified, the system absolutizes the predicate by default: it turns a situational statement into an essentialist label.
Basic Substitution
- Original form: X exhibits property Y (at a given moment, in a particular aspect or episode).
- Substituted form: X is Y by nature (always, everywhere, completely).
How This Manifests
- “He is absolutizing right now” → “He is always an absolutizer.”
- “There is a Flat Mind pattern in this reasoning” → “You labeled the entire person Flat Mind.”
- “The model does not explain everything” → “You oppose all models / science.”
Working Formula
Predicative absolutization is a mechanism in which a property manifested in a particular context is converted into an absolute assertion about the subject’s essence.
Two Modes of Reading
- Living mode: “He acts as X in this context” (the context may be implicit).
- Flat Mind mode: “He is X absolutely” (absoluteness is added automatically).
Main Failure
The system selects not the minimal interpretation but the maximal one:
– it does not ask, “in what sense / at what scale / in what context?”;
– it immediately reads the statement as “always / everywhere / without exception.”
As a consequence, contradictions often arise not in the original thought but in its artificially absolutized version.
Why Conflict Arises in Dialogue
Living speech relies on implicit context, intonation, and situation. Absolutizing parsing loses these, and the interlocutor is assigned a rigid “label” that the speaker never asserted.
Practical Conclusion
To avoid false conflicts, one must distinguish:
– predicate vs. essence;
– episode/mode vs. “always”;
– local context vs. total generalization.
General Meaning of the Term
Absolutization is the elevation of something into an absolute, the attribution of unconditional, self-sufficient significance to an idea, fact, rule, or property.
Put simply, it is the process whereby something relative, particular, or conditional is treated as absolute, eternal, and true in every situation, regardless of circumstances.
Main Aspects
- In thinking: an operation that creates “absolute objects,” abstractions treated as independent of everything else.
- In life (figurative sense): exaggerating the importance of something, turning a principle into dogma.
- Synonyms: making absolute, fetishization, deification.
Examples of Absolutization
- Absolutization of science’s role: claiming that only scientific knowledge is true, while other forms of knowing (art, religion) are useless.
- Absolutization of rules: blindly following an instruction even when circumstances call for violating it (“the rule above all else”).
- Absolutization of success: believing that the sole meaning of life is career or financial success, while disregarding health or family.
Philosophical Context
In philosophy, absolutization is often associated with the search for the ultimate foundation of the world (for example, Hegel’s “absolute spirit”).
