Skinner's maxim

专有名词

英文释义

专有名词
  1. The principle that any historical account of what someone meant by a certain action or statement must in some measure conform to that person’s own understanding of what they were saying or doing.
    — When we respect Skinner’s maxim we shall give an account of the dead thinker ‘in his own terms’, ignoring the fact that we should think ill of anyone who still used those terms today. When we ignore Skinner’s maxim, we give an account ‘in our own terms’, ignoring the fact that the dead thinker, in his linguistic habits as he lived, would have repudiated these terms as foregn to his interests and intentions.

词源

After British intellectual historian Quentin Skinner, who formulated the principle in 1969.
0 次浏览 数据来源: Wiktionary