principle
English
Etymology
Borrowed from Old French principe, from Latin prīncipium (“beginning, foundation”), from prīnceps (“first”); see prince.
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): /ˈpɹɪnsɪpəl/, /ˈpɹɪnsəpəl/
Audio (US) (file) - Hyphenation: prin‧ci‧ple
- Homophone: principal
Noun
principle (plural principles)
- A fundamental assumption or guiding belief.
- 2011 July 20, Edwin Mares, “Propositional Functions”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, retrieved 2012-07-15:
- Let us consider ‘my dog is asleep on the floor’ again. Frege thinks that this sentence can be analyzed in various different ways. Instead of treating it as expressing the application of __ is asleep on the floor to my dog, we can think of it as expressing the application of the concept
my dog is asleep on __
to the object
the floor
(see Frege 1919). Frege recognizes what is now a commonplace in the logical analysis of natural language. We can attribute more than one logical form to a single sentence. Let us call this the principle of multiple analyses. Frege does not claim that the principle always holds, but as we shall see, modern type theory does claim this.
- Let us consider ‘my dog is asleep on the floor’ again. Frege thinks that this sentence can be analyzed in various different ways. Instead of treating it as expressing the application of __ is asleep on the floor to my dog, we can think of it as expressing the application of the concept
- We need some sort of principles to reason from.
-
- A rule used to choose among solutions to a problem.
- The principle of least privilege holds that a process should only receive the permissions it needs.
- (sometimes pluralized) Moral rule or aspect.
- I don't doubt your principles.
- You are clearly a person of principle.
- It's the principle of the thing; I won't do business with someone I can't trust.
- (physics) A rule or law of nature, or the basic idea on how the laws of nature are applied.
- 2013 July-August, Sarah Glaz, “Ode to Prime Numbers”, in American Scientist, volume 101, number 4:
- Some poems, echoing the purpose of early poetic treatises on scientific principles, attempt to elucidate the mathematical concepts that underlie prime numbers. Others play with primes’ cultural associations. Still others derive their structure from mathematical patterns involving primes.
- Bernoulli's Principle
- The Pauli Exclusion Principle prevents two fermions from occupying the same state.
- The principle of the internal combustion engine
-
- A fundamental essence, particularly one producing a given quality.
- Gregory
- Cathartine is the bitter, purgative principle of senna.
- Many believe that life is the result of some vital principle.
- Gregory
- (obsolete) A beginning.
- Edmund Spenser
- Doubting sad end of principle unsound.
- Edmund Spenser
- A source, or origin; that from which anything proceeds; fundamental substance or energy; primordial substance; ultimate element, or cause.
- Tillotson
- The soul of man is an active principle.
- Tillotson
- An original faculty or endowment.
- Stewart
- those active principles whose direct and ultimate object is the communication either of enjoyment or suffering
- Stewart
Usage notes
- Principle ("moral rule"), as a noun, is often confused with principal, which can be an adjective ("most important") or a noun ("school principal"). A memory aid to avoid this confusion is: "The principal alphabetic principle places A before E".
Synonyms
- (moral rule or aspect): tenet
Derived terms
Terms derived from principle (noun)
- agreement in principle
- anthropic principle
- Aufbau principle
- Bernoulli's principle
- correspondence principle
- cosmological principle
- Dilbert principle
- dormitive principle
- equivalence principle
- extractive principle
- first principles
- Huygens' principle
- IBM Pollyanna Principle
- Le Chatelier's principle
- Mach's principle
- matter of principle
- Matthew principle
- Mitchell principle
- on principle
- Pareto principle
- Pauli exclusion principle
- Peter principle
- pigeonhole principle
- pleasure principle
- precautionary principle
- principle of contradiction
- principle of excluded middle
- principle of least action
- principle of substitutivity
- principled
- reality principle
- reciprocity principle
- strong equivalence principle
- superposition principle
- uncertainty principle
- verifiability principle
Related terms
Translations
fundamental assumption
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rule to solve a problem
moral rule or aspect
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rule of nature
- The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables, removing any numbers. Numbers do not necessarily match those in definitions. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout#Translations.
Translations to be checked
Verb
principle (third-person singular simple present principles, present participle principling, simple past and past participle principled)
Further reading
- principle in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.
- principle in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911.
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