Sorry, that was me being unclear! The situation I’m envisaging is:
We want more X.
We can’t detect X directly, so we’ll pick some marker for X that looks like X (that’s what I was going at with “formal”, “relating to the form of”), and then aim for that.
Oops our markers don’t capture X, or even exclude some important bits of X.
Can you say what you mean by ‘formal markers’? I’ve never heard this term before.
Sorry, that was me being unclear! The situation I’m envisaging is:
We want more X.
We can’t detect X directly, so we’ll pick some marker for X that looks like X (that’s what I was going at with “formal”, “relating to the form of”), and then aim for that.
Oops our markers don’t capture X, or even exclude some important bits of X.