Dictionary

dormitive virtue en · NOUN

Etymology

A calque translation of Latin, virtus dormitiva, coined by Molière in The Imaginary Invalid. In the play, he lampoons a group of physicians providing an explanation in macaronic Latin of the sleep-inducing properties of opium as stemming from its "virtus dormitiva".

Meanings

1. (idiomatic, rhetoric) A type of tautology in which an item is explained in terms of the item itself, only put in different (usually more abstract) words.
   • 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. 2003, Henry E. Kyburg, Mariam Thalos, Probability is the Very Guide of Life, page 66:
   • 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. 2013, Charles Bolyard, Rondo Keele, Later Medieval Metaphysics: Ontology, Language, and Logic, page 147:
   • 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. 2021, Karen Bennett, Dean W. Zimmerman, Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, volume 12, page 29:
   • 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 1998, Rae Langton, Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves, page 176:
   • 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]. 2021, Richard E. Michod, Darwinian Dynamics: Evolutionary Transitions in Fitness and Individuality, page 186:
   • 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 1968, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, American Philosophical Association, page 6:

Forms

Relateds

aureation · jargon

Synonyms

dormitive principle

Translations (4)

pt virtude dormitiva (rhetoric) · es virtud dormitiva (rhetoric) · fi virtus dormitiva (rhetoric) · la virtus dormitiva (rhetoric)