Word.ws English Dictionary

Morgan's canon

Morgan's canon proper noun: a fundamental precept of comparative animal psychology, stating that an animal's activity should not be interpreted in terms of higher psychological processes if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of simpler developmental processes.

Proper noun

Morgan's canon

  1. A fundamental precept of comparative animal psychology, stating that an animal's activity should not be interpreted in terms of higher psychological processes if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of simpler developmental processes.

Origin of Morgan's canon

Proposed by the 19th-century British psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan.

Questions about Morgan's canon

What does Morgan's canon mean?
Morgan's canon means a fundamental precept of comparative animal psychology, stating that an animal's activity should not be interpreted in terms of higher psychological processes if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of simpler developmental processes.
What part of speech is Morgan's canon?
Morgan's canon is a proper noun.

Words near Morgan's canon in the dictionary

  1. Morgan Hill
  2. Morgan horse
  3. Morgan horses
  4. Morgan Island
  5. Morgan le Fay
  6. Morgan's canon
  7. Morgan's mule
  8. Morgana
  9. morganatic
  10. morganatic marriage
  11. morganatic marriages

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Morgan's canon (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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