dormitive virtue

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".

dormitive virtue (plural dormitive virtues)

1. (idiomatic, rhetoric, logic, linguistics) A type of tautology in which an item is explained in terms of the item itself, only put in different (usually more abstract) words.
   • 1968, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, American Philosophical Association, page 6:

     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

   • 1998, Rae Langton, Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves, page 176:

     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

   • 2003, Henry E. Kyburg, Mariam Thalos, Probability is the Very Guide of Life, page 66:

     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.

   • 2013, Charles Bolyard, Rondo Keele, Later Medieval Metaphysics: Ontology, Language, and Logic, page 147:

     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.

   • 2021, Karen Bennett, Dean W. Zimmerman, Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, volume 12, page 29:

     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, Richard E. Michod, Darwinian Dynamics: Evolutionary Transitions in Fitness and Individuality, page 186:

     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].

• dormitive principle

• aureation
• jargon
• skotison