Butterfield's Whig-history critique, refined by Weinberg's science exemption, splits the vault's AI-history corrections into defensible present-knowledge appraisal and anachronistic concept-importing

The vault holds a saturated cluster of AI-history corrections — the "credit assignment" label the 1974 Werbos thesis never used (claim-werbos-1974-no-credit-assignment-language), the reading of a 1986 journal table of contents as a deliberate pairing of NETtalk with an unrelated cellular-automaton paper (claim-complex-systems-issue-one-paired-nettalk-with-cellular-automaton), Amari's uncited priority over Hopfield (myth-amari-first-sgd-mlp), and the Perceptrons myth (myth-perceptrons-book-killed-connectionism) — without ever naming, until this note, what general fallacy all of them police. Historians of science already have the name: Whig history (claim-butterfield-1931-coined-whig-history-as-present-referenced-past), "the past with reference to the present."

The frame does not import into the vault cleanly, and that is where the value is. Steven Weinberg's defense of Whig history for science specifically (claim-weinberg-2015-defends-whig-history-as-legitimate-for-science) — "in scientific history we really can say who was right" — draws a boundary this observation applies to the myth-ledger: judging, with present knowledge, that Werbos's equations amount to a gradient computation, or that NETtalk is a genuine backprop landmark, is defensible present-knowledge appraisal of the kind Weinberg licenses. Attaching a later concept or intent the original actors never had — the specific compound "spatial credit assignment," a deliberate editorial "pairing" of two papers that never addressed each other — is the anachronism Butterfield warned against, the kind Weinberg does not defend. Read this way, the myth-ledger's real target has mostly been the second kind, not the first, though no existing note ever made that boundary explicit.

The sharpest test case sits inside the vault's own most-trusted source for this material: Schmidhuber's Annotated History runs an anti-Whig credit-correction campaign while itself reading "deep learning" back onto 1676–1914 mathematics (claim-schmidhubers-annotated-history-projects-deep-learning-onto-pre-1900-mathematics) — one document failing the second test while succeeding at the first. Michael Mahoney's warning against whiggish computing history (claim-mahoney-warned-against-whig-history-of-computing) is the disciplinary bridge that makes this vault's home domain a legitimate target for the critique in the first place. See moc-backpropagation-origins.