principle
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈpɹɪnsɪpəl/
ipa: /ˈpɹɪnsəpəl/
homophone: principal
Forms: form: principles
Etymology: From Middle English principle, from Old French principe, from Latin prīncipium (“beginning, foundation”), from prīnceps (“first”). By surface analysis, prīmus (“first”) + -ceps (“catcher”); the former ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *preh₂- (“before”); see also prince.
Senses: examples: text: We need some sort of principles to reason from.
text: 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.
ref: 2011 July 20, Edwin Mares, “Propositional Functions”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, retrieved 15 Jul 2012:
synonyms: premise
glosses: A fundamental assumption or guiding belief.
examples: text: The principle of least privilege holds that a process should only receive the permissions it needs.
text: Mr. Genachowski proposed codifying the new principles with four existing principles issued several years ago by the F.C.C. They say that network operators cannot prevent users from accessing lawful Internet content, applications and services of their choice, nor can they prohibit users from attaching nonharmful devices to the network.
ref: 2009 September 22, Reuters, “F.C.C. Calls Open Internet Rules Vital”, in The New York Times:
glosses: A rule used to choose among solutions to a problem.
examples: text: I don't doubt your principles.
text: You are clearly a person of principle.
text: It's the principle of the thing; I won't do business with someone I can't trust.
text: Lavinia—shrewd, careless, clever; ready to meet any difficulty, however humiliating, that might occur; utterly without principle; confident in that good fortune, which she scrupled at no means of attaining—was the very type of the real.
ref: 1837, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], “The Author and the Actress”, in Ethel Churchill: Or, The Two Brides. […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, page 105:
synonyms: tenet
qualifier: sometimes pluralized
glosses: Moral rule or aspect.
examples: text: Bernoulli's principle
text: The Pauli Exclusion Principle prevents two fermions from occupying the same state.
text: The principle of the internal combustion engine
text: 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.
ref: 2013 July-August, Sarah Glaz, “Ode to Prime Numbers”, in American Scientist, volume 101, number 4:
topics: natural-sciences
physical-sciences
physics
glosses: A rule or law of nature, or the basic idea on how the laws of nature are applied.
examples: text: Many believe that life is the result of some vital principle.
glosses: A fundamental essence, particularly one producing a given quality.
examples: text: the active principle
text: Cathartine is the bitter, purgative principle of senna.
ref: 1845, William Gregory, Outlines of Chemistry:
glosses: A fundamental essence, particularly one producing a given quality.
A chemical compound within plant or animal tissue that is characteristic of it and more or less peculiar to it, such that it defines the character of that tissue from a human viewpoint (as for example nicotine in tobacco).
examples: text: The soul of man is an active principle.
ref: 1664, John Tillotson, “Sermon I. The Wisdom of Being Religious. Job XXVIII. 28.”, in The Works of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson, Late Lord Archbishop of Canterbury: […], London: […] B. Aylmer, […]; [a]nd W. Rogers, […], published 1696, →OCLC:
glosses: A source, or origin; that from which anything proceeds; fundamental substance or energy; primordial substance; ultimate element, or cause.
examples: text: those active principles whose direct and ultimate object is the communication either of enjoyment or suffering
ref: 1828, Dugald Stewart, The Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man:
glosses: An original faculty or endowment.
glosses: Misspelling of principal.
examples: text: Doubting sad end of principle unsound.
ref: 1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book V, Canto IX”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 2:
glosses: A beginning.
Derived terms: acceleration principle
agreement in principle
Anna Karenina principle
anthropic principle
Archimedes' principle
arm's length principle
aufbau principle
Babinet's principle
BANANA principle
Bernoulli's principle
Bridlington principle
Cavalieri's principle
Chicago principles
composite reuse principle
context principle
cooperative principle
Copernican principle
Copernican time principle
correspondence principle
cosmological principle
Courant minimax principle
d'Alembert's principle
day-year principle
dependency inversion principle
desert principle
Dilbert principle
Dirichlet's box principle
Dirichlet's drawer principle
dormitive principle
equivalence principle
extractive principle
Fermat's principle
Fermat's principle of least time
Fick principle
first principle
first principles
four-eye principle
Franck-Condon principle
Goldilocks principle
Haldane principle
handicap principle
Hardy-Weinberg principle
harm principle
Heisenberg principle
Heisenberg uncertainty principle
Hollywood principle
holographic principle
Huygens-Fresnel principle
Huygens' principle
IBM Pollyanna Principle
indeterminacy principle
in principle
interface segregation principle
Kerckhoffs's principle
KISS principle
Lagrange-d'Alembert principle
Landauer's principle
Le Chatelier's principle
Le Châtelier's principle
life/dinner principle
life-dinner principle
Liskov substitution principle
Lotus principle
Mach's principle
matter of principle
Matthew principle
MAYA principle
mediocrity principle
metaprinciple
Micawber principle
Mitchell principle
non-aggression principle
nonaggression principle
Novikov self-consistency principle
on principle
open/closed principle
open-closed principle
Pareto principle
parsimony principle
Pauli exclusion principle
Peter Parker principle
Peter principle
pigeonhole principle
Planck's principle
pleasure principle
polluter pays principle
precautionary principle
principled
principle of charity
principle of contradiction
principle of excluded middle
principle of explosion
principle of indifference
principle of insufficient reason
principle of least action
principle of least astonishment
principle of least knowledge
principle of least surprise
principle of least time
principle of legality
principle of locality
principle of parsimony
principle of Pseudo-Scotus
principle of relativity
principle of substitutivity
principle of sufficient reason
principle of verifiability
principle of verification
proximate principle
Q-principle
reality principle
rebus principle
reciprocity principle
Ritz's combination principle
Robbins principle
R-principle
Rydberg-Ritz combination principle
Sandford principle
Scheimpflug principle
sector principle
Shirky principle
single responsibility principle
Smurfette principle
Spider-Man principle
strong equivalence principle
superposition principle
uncertainty principle
verifiability principle
verification principle
vicious circle principle
Yao's principle
Related terms: prince
principal
principality