Does anyone know if there is there a name for the idea that new concepts (such as negative numbers, complex numbers or type constructors in a type system) are only ever introduced into a preexisting "system" so that they can be eliminated later, after helping make some progress?
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How were negative numbers eliminated?
The idea is that at some point in the distant past, there was a system of counting that didn't involve negative numbers. But it didn't give us a way to deal with concepts like "owing", so negative numbers were introduced. We still don't really have an *understading* of a...
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...negative quantity of any material thing, but we can eliminate negative numbers by combining them with other numbers (positive or negative) to get back to a positive number which we can understand. Complex numbers are similar.
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Not sure eliminated is a good word here, or that these concepts are only introduced to be it
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For me "-1" is as " imaginary", in the sense of "not natural" as "i", so, maybe, what you are looking for are " imaginary concepts ", but then there are, maybe, too many of them. An "imaginary" has, somewhat abusively, already been used for complex numbers.
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