Historian's fallacy
Assuming past actors had the same knowledge as later analysts.
The historian's fallacy is an informal error made when someone assumes that past decision-makers saw events with the same perspective and information as later analysts. This differs from presentism, a related but separate approach where modern ideas, like moral standards, are imposed on the past. The concept was first introduced by British literary critic Matthew Arnold in 1880, and later named and defined by American historian David Hackett Fischer in 1970.
Quick Facts
- Field
- Historical analysis, informal logic
Facts from the source article.
Concept
The historian's fallacy describes the mistake of judging past works or events with the benefit of knowledge that was unavailable at the time. Matthew Arnold first pointed this out in 1880, writing that when critics view a poet's work as part of a nation's linguistic or cultural development, they may overrate it, praising it far beyond its actual merit. He called this the "historic" fallacy. The term "historian's fallacy" itself was coined by David Hackett Fischer in 1970, who compared it to William James's psychologist's fallacy.
Fischer did not argue that historians should avoid looking back with analysis, but stressed that historical figures could not see the future. As an example, he discussed the common claim that the United States should have predicted Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor due to many warning signs. Fischer, drawing on Roberta Wohlstetter's research, noted that this view ignores the many conflicting signals pointing to other possibilities. Only later do the warnings appear obvious, while contradictory evidence is forgotten.
To avoid this fallacy, military historians sometimes use the "fog of war technique," which evaluates decisions based solely on what the person knew at the time, not on later events. Fischer credited American historian Douglas Southall Freeman with pioneering this method in his biographies of Robert E. Lee and George Washington.
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