Spurious Constructions

July 23rd, 2006 Fred McVittie Posted in Belief, Fiction, Metaphor, Substance, Theory |

Organised theoretical edifices, including scientific theories, metaphysical systems, and belief complexes, often contain entities which we may have no direct evidence of, but which must be posited to exist if the theory/belief is to maintain coherence. Such entities may be inferred circumstantially and may eventually turn out to be valid and ‘real’, or may be found to be purely fictitious. Non-real historical examples of such entities include epicycles, luminiferous ether, caloric, and ‘muelos’. An example of such a postulated entity which was subsequently acquired reality status is the planet Uranus, discovered not by observation but by inference, based on perturbations in the orbits of other heavenly bodies. It is tempting to assume that scientific progress and the dominance of rational physics in formulating evidence about the real world would reduce the reliance on such speculative entities, or at least that once an entity was found to be fictional that it would cease to appear in discourse (in the way that caloric does not routinely appear). However, this is not entirely the case, sometimes such fictions are allowed to survive in the language and in conception because they provide a particular human function related to the embodied nature of subjective being, as opposed to the disembodied nature of objective knowledge. Examples of such fictional entities might include: energy (as a substance or force), colours (as distinct, bounded entities), weight (as a property of substances and objects).

Routine discourse which includes reference to abstract concepts which can only be understood through the use of these spurious constructions, which function largely through the application of metaphors.