The 'Perceptrons killed connectionism' myth only half-fits Skinner's taxonomy — its causal-attribution component falls outside all four mythologies

myth-perceptrons-book-killed-connectionism records the popular claim that Minsky and Papert's 1969 Perceptrons "proved neural networks were a dead end and single-handedly caused the field's ~15-year stall." Read against Skinner's four mythologies (claim-skinner-1969-names-four-mythologies-doctrines-coherence-prolepsis-parochialism), the myth splits into two components, only one of which has a home in Skinner's taxonomy.

The doctrinal component fits mythology of doctrines. claim-perceptrons-multilayer-sterile-was-conjecture establishes that the book's multilayer-pessimism line was a self-flagged "intuitive judgment," with an explicit invitation to reject it — not a proof. Compressing that hedge into a firm "the book proved X" is Skinner's first form of the doctrines mythology: "converting some scattered or quite incidental remarks by a classic theorist into his 'doctrine.'"

The causal component has no home in Skinner's taxonomy. The claim that the book "caused the field's ~15-year stall" is not a claim about what Minsky and Papert meant or said — the entire domain Skinner's essay addresses — but a claim about multi-actor, multi-decade institutional and funding history, the same terrain myth-perceptrons-book-killed-connectionism already shows to be multi-causal (the Mansfield Amendment, the Lighthill Report, the absence of any hidden-layer training method until 1986). Skinner's four mythologies are built around interpreting a single writer's intended meaning or the coherence of a single writer's own corpus; none addresses causal explanation of a field's trajectory across many actors and institutions. The myth is not ambiguous between two of Skinner's modes — it fuses one Skinner mode with one non-Skinner mode into a single popular claim.