Skinner's Machiavelli 'founder' example adds a causal-naivety charge to the vault's Schmidhuber prolepsis case

Skinner's 1969 essay works a second case later in the same prolepsis section — after Petrarch/Renaissance and after the intervening Plato and Rousseau examples he calls "crude versions... very readily exposed," with Machiavelli introduced as the same prolepsis recurring "in a less noticeable fashion" — and it is a tighter structural match for the vault's Schmidhuber periodization case (claim-schmidhubers-annotated-history-projects-deep-learning-onto-pre-1900-mathematics) than Petrarch is. Historians have called Machiavelli "the founder of the modern political orientation" (Skinner's fn. 100, quoting Warren Winiarski). Skinner grants this "may well provide a true account of Machiavelli's historical significance" while insisting it cannot be a true account of Machiavelli's own intended meaning — and adds a parenthetical Petrarch's case doesn't carry: the founder-label "seems to presuppose a somewhat naive view of historical causation."

That parenthetical names a second error riding alongside the first. Calling someone the "founder of" a later-named field doesn't only conflate retrospective significance with intended meaning — the core of claim-skinner-1969-mythology-of-prolepsis-conflates-significance-with-meaning — it also smuggles in an unearned claim that the founding figure caused the field to exist. Schmidhuber's Annotated History does exactly this about the 1676 chain rule: it reads "deep learning" back onto the mathematics (significance/meaning conflation, already classified as prolepsis), and its periodization implicitly casts that mathematics as the causal origin of a field it could not have been intended to found — the same "naive view of historical causation" Skinner names, in passing, in the Machiavelli case.

This does not change the Schmidhuber case's existing classification as prolepsis; it adds a second, previously uncited dimension — a causal-attribution charge — to what had been read as a single-axis significance/meaning error.