Meaning of dormitive virtue | Babel Free

Definitions

A type of tautology in which an item is explained in terms of the item itself, only put in different (usually more abstract) words.

idiomatic, rhetoric

Equivalents

Examples

“The inevitable next suggestion -— that aesthetic experience is distinguished not by pleasure at all but by a special aesthetic emotion can be dropped on the waste-pile of "dormitive virtue” explanations”

“Solidity now has all the defects of a dormitive virtue, obscurity, unobservability, something-we-know-notwhattery — and none of the advantages of a dormitive virtue”

“Because (1) is postulated and at the same time used as a covering law, the putative explanations are vacuous in the sense in which explanatory appeals to dormitive virtue are.”

“Now admittedly, this has the look of a dormitive virtue argument: the reason the intellect can recollect its own activity is that it possesses just such a recollective capacity.”

“But if talk of such facts just arises via hypostatizations out of the relevant truths, then the facts posited can't explain the truths except via a blatant dormitive virtue explanation.”

“Fitness is not the empty idea of a dormitive virtue. The point is that although fitness is explanatory, it seems to be a placeholder for a deeper account that dispenses with the concept of fitness [again the propensity concept].”

CEFR level