Is there a term for the principle of preferring earlier statements over later statements made by historical eye witnesses?

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I don't believe there is a canonical name for that one principle, all by itself. Rather this is one of the common principles of Source Criticism, which are intended to be used together (highlighting mine):

The following principles are cited from two Scandinavian textbooks on source criticism, written by the historians Olden-JΓΈrgensen (1998) and ThurΓ©n (1997):

  • Human sources may be relics (e.g. a fingerprint) or narratives (e.g. a statement or a letter). Relics are more credible sources than narratives.
  • A given source may be forged or corrupted; strong indications of the originality of the source increases its reliability.
  • The closer a source is to the event which it purports to describe, the more one can trust it to give an accurate description of what really happened
  • A primary source is more reliable than a secondary source, which in turn is more reliable than a tertiary source and so on.
  • If a number of independent sources contain the same message, the credibility of the message is strongly increased.
  • The tendency of a source is its motivation for providing some kind of bias. Tendencies should be minimized or supplemented with opposite motivations.
  • If it can be demonstrated that the witness (or source) has no direct interest in creating bias, the credibility of the message is increased.

I'm not sure how (/if?) this is taught in schools, but it doesn't look like there's an accepted universal mental framework/jargon for learning and applying the principles, like say we Computer Science students got for the Software Analysis principles of Cohesion and Coupling. Perhaps professional Historians' brains don't work that way, or perhaps there just aren't as many Source Analysts out there as there are coders.

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