Lloyd Morgan's canonn.
/ˌlɔɪd ˌmɔːɡ(ə)nz ˈkanən/, U.S. /ˌlɔɪd ˌmɔrɡənz ˈkænən/ Psychology.
(See quot. 1937.)
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Lloyd Morgan's canon1937
1894 C. L. Morgan Introd. Compar. Psychol. iii. 53 In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale.]
1937 Discovery May 162/1 No action must be interpreted as a higher psychological process if it can be interpreted as one lower in the scale. This is known as ‘the Lloyd Morgan canon’.
1964 A. Koestler in Listener 14 May 786/2 A principle which became a kind of eleventh commandment for psychologists, known as ‘Lloyd Morgan's canon’.
1968 E. Boring in Internat. Encycl. Social Sci. X. 495/2 He [sc. Lloyd Morgan] is best known for what has come to be called Lloyd Morgan's canon, which demands parsimony in the inference of an animal's place on the scale of mind from its behavior.
This entry has not yet been fully updated (first published 1976; most recently modified version published online March 2022).
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n.1937