Language: en
Meaning: (idiomatic,rhetoric,logic,linguistics)A type oftautologyin 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” explanations1998, Rae Langton,Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves, page176:Solidity now has all the defects of adormitive virtue, obscurity, unobservability, something-we-know-notwhattery — and none of the advantages of adormitive virtue2003,Henry E. Kyburg, Mariam Thalos,Probability is the Very Guide of Life, page66: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 todormitive virtueare.2013, Charles Bolyard, Rondo Keele,Later Medieval Metaphysics: Ontology, Language, and Logic, page147:Now admittedly, this has the look of adormitive virtueargument: 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, volume12, page29: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 blatantdormitive virtueexplanation.2021, Richard E. Michod,Darwinian Dynamics: Evolutionary Transitions in Fitness and Individuality, page186:Fitness is not the empty idea of adormitive 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].
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