Historian's fallacy
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The historian's fallacy is a logical fallacy that occurs by assuming that decision makers of the past viewed events from the same perspective and having the same information as those subsequently analyzing the decision.
Experiments in psychology suggest that people tend to inaccurately remember as more important the very events that eventually, from the historian's perspective, turned out to be important. Thereby arises the difficulty in discounting the one's present-day advantage of knowing what turned out to have happened. In that discipline the effect is known as hindsight bias.
The fallacy was proposed by David Hackett Fischer, who suggested it was analogous to William James' psychologist's fallacy.
Examples:
- Julius Caesar should not have seized power, because he would only be assassinated.
- World War I should not have been fought, because it accomplished nothing and led only to World War II.
References
- Fischer, D. H. (1970). Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. New York: Harper Torchbooks.es:Falacia del historiador