I first heard about the concept of dormitive explanation in university. Ever since, it’s been one of my basic tools for errors in logic and thinking more clearly.
The concept has been articulated several times in the last few centuries, but, so far as I can tell, the person who named it was system theorist Gregory Bateson. The name comes from Moliére’s play The Imaginary Invalid (aka The Hypochondriac), in which a doctor claims that opium puts people to sleep “because there is a dormitive principle in it.”
In other words, opium puts people to sleeve because it puts people to sleep. When the statement is reworded, the circular cause and effect is obvious, but an essential part of a dormitive explanation is that the circularity is hidden by changing the word being used. Often, as in Moliére’s play, the change in word involves using a word with a Latin word rather than a Germanic one, or, at the very least, a more impressive, mufti-syllabic word. In any case, the effect is to leave the impression that something has been explained when it has only been renamed.
Or, to explain the concept another way, dormitive explanation is a fallacy, an indicator of an illogical argument that the classical Greek and Roman studies of rhetoric somehow missed.
Dormitive explanations rarely exist in the hard sciences, although at first they might appear to. Explanatory principles like “gravity” or “mass” might act like dormitive explanations for the semi-trained – for example, things fall because of gravity, which is the tendency for things to fall – but the fact that they can be used to calculate other behaviors indicates that they are more than circular causality hidden by a change in terminology.
However, on the fringes of science, dormitive explanation becomes more common.. For instance, consciousness is often described as the capacity for self-awareness. Often, words like “syndrome” or “complex” or “effect” are used, so that feelings of inadequacy become “impostor syndrome”with no attempt to classify symptoms systematically.
Similarly, in many New Age philosophies, explanations are give in terms of “energy,” which – since the term obviously does not refer to any sort of energy recognized by physics – amounts to just another name for a dormitive principle.
In some ways, dormitive explanation can become an appeal to authority, either to the authority of the explainer, or to the force or principle evoked as an explanation. For example, if you say that men have evolved to be better at mathematics than women, not only are you suggesting an evolutionary tendency whose existence is unproved, but you are mentioning evolution in the hopes of presenting an argument that others cannot challenge.
In fact, dormitive explanation is all about authority. It makes the person who gives it sound authoritative, and, if accepted, gives listeners a sense that something that concerns them has been explained. In practice, no explanation has been given at all, but unless the listeners can analyze while someone else speaks, they are unlikely to recognize what is happening until later.
Many, of course, never recognize it all, and have no desire to do so. After all, which would you rather do: suffer from joint pain, or have arthritis? The problem is not that arthritis doesn’t exist, but that it is a generic term that covers dozens of different conditions. That means that being told you have arthritis actually does people little good. Yet, having a scientific-sounding name for their condition is reassuring for many people, even if the name does little to suggest treatment or prognosis.
What makes the concept of dormitive explanation so important to me is the fact that it is generally unrecognized and used to assert authority and give false reassurance. By contrast, by being aware of the concept, you can learn to notice it when you encounter it, and reject the lack of logic behind it. The result can be not only clearer thinking, but a clearer sense of what to do next.
Off the Wall 
Good stuff, and I agree totally, but … perhaps your example of using the word ‘energy’ isn’t the best. That term has a very long history in its “fuzzy” use dating all the way back to Aristotle. Physicists appropriated it to label the mathematical quantity back around 1800.
So, although it greatly peeves me to hear things like “pure energy” which are pure nonsense in terms of physics, and there probably is at least a 50% probability that the people spouting such nonsense are attempting a dormitive explanation (as you put it), I’ve never felt it’s really fair to complain about that specific point.
I do notice an awful lot of people citing quantum mechanics as a reason for believing the most wildly unlikely pseudo-scientific bilge. That’s a much better example, to my mind.
I don’t know why it’s not fair to complain about the use of “energy” in this way. Just because it’s old?
For that matter, I could have used vitalism as another example, and that’s probably just as old.
“Energy” in the physics sense is a specific technical usage which doesn’t replace the common usage. It’s still perfectly valid to say “I love the energy of this group,” for example, and especially valid to use it in sentences like “my dog ran out of energy.” I don’t gripe about such usage because it feels like complaining that somebody says “his memory is great” but doesn’t mean computer memory. The contrast with “memory” is just more obvious because it’s a much newer usage.
That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to abuse the word, of course. I already implicitly gave one example above – any time somebody talks about “pure energy” they probably are trying to invoke the physics meaning – and are revealing their own lack of understanding (or possibly just speaking way too loosely). The specific problem there is that energy is a property of systems of matter & space, so “pure energy” is nonsense. It’s like saying “pure temperature”… except the latter would be obvious nonsense. 🙂
The really annoying thing about this – in my experience – is that the same people who like to try to snow us with these kinds of illogic also try hard to stay in whatever grey area they can exploit with their language. Words like “energy” with well-established double meanings are an easy trick; you’re never quite sure if they’re just being imprecise or doing it deliberately, because they rarely use easy-to-catch examples like “pure energy” or obvious colloquialisms like “my energy levels are low.”
Instead they say things like this: “This advanced homeopathic remedy utilizes a unique triple-potency process that creates taste-free medicines in a bio-energetically enhanced pure water base. The remedy supports energy production.” We know this is BS (because it’s selling homeopathy), and from that we could infer that they’re using “energetic” in the way you mean… but it’s not clear or obvious from the sentence itself and it’s easy to imagine all kinds of good face-saving answers they could give if you took them to task for misusing the word.
The word “paradigm,” in contrast, really does seem to be a 100% guaranteed red-flag sign of a faulty dormitive/appeal-to-authority argument. James Randi said it all on the subject in a talk I heard from him years back: “they like to use this word because they don’t know what it means, and neither does anybody else.”
Don’t forget, I’m not talking about the word “energy” by itself. I’m talking about “energy” being used in a causal sentence. For instance, “You’re stressed out because of all the negative energy you’ve been putting out.”
There’s a rant about Mensa here which you might like:
http://wp.me/p2zDWj-23
Thanks for the link, but I have little interest in Mensa one way or the other. All I did was write an article five years ago expressing my feelings about the organization. Since then, just about the only time I’ve ever thought about Mensa is when people have responded to the article.
It’s easy to recognise dormitive explanations: they’re the ones that put you to sleep.
*slow clap*
But seriously, this is a very nice post. You give a few examples and suggest some reasons for the use of dormitive explanation.
The evolutionary example is an excellent case in point. There is a history of literature regarding ‘just so’ stories, those that purport to explain the emergence of a trait “because it is useful”. This error is especially egregious when used to ground offensive doctrine, e.g. that men have an innate mathematical capacity lacking in women.