Skinner's 1969 essay names four distinct historiographical 'mythologies' — doctrines, coherence, prolepsis, parochialism — not one generic anachronism

Quentin Skinner's "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas" (1969) does not name a single fallacy of anachronism; it decomposes it into at least four named, non-identical failure modes, treated as related but distinct:

• Mythology of doctrines — crediting a classic writer with a "doctrine," often built from "scattered or quite incidental remarks," using a vocabulary or systematic position the writer never articulated; or conversely faulting a writer for "failing" to address a topic he could never have intended to address. ("The (very frequent) result is a type of discussion which might be labelled the mythology of doctrines.")
• Mythology of coherence — imposing a unified, systematic reading on a body of work that may never have possessed it. ("a form of writing which might be labelled the mythology of coherence.")
• Mythology of prolepsis — conflating a text's later, observer-recognized significance with the author's own intended meaning (claim-skinner-1969-mythology-of-prolepsis-conflates-significance-with-meaning), arising "in considering what significance the argument of some classic text might be said to have for us."
• Mythology of parochialism — misdescribing an alien argument by unconsciously importing the observer's own familiar categories. ("The result is then a mythology of parochialism.")

Prolepsis is the narrowest of the four: it is specifically the significance/meaning conflation, not the broader term- or doctrine-crediting error. This taxonomy is what lets the vault avoid treating "anachronism" as a single undifferentiated charge. Its home cluster is the AI-history myth-ledger under moc-backpropagation-origins and the Whig-history thread named at observation-whig-history-splits-vault-myth-ledger-into-defensible-and-anachronistic; Skinner's finer cut sits one level below Butterfield's binary of present-knowledge appraisal versus anachronistic concept-importing.