Historical fallacy

The historical fallacy is a logical fallacy originally described by philosopher John Dewey in The Psychological Review in 1896. Most simply put, the fallacy occurs when a person believes that results occur only because of the process taken to obtain them. Dewey writes:

Examples

A man loses his wallet but has an idea of where it might be.
He looks for his wallet and finds it where he thought it may have been.
The man falsely concludes that he knew where his wallet was the entire time.
Thus, the man incorrectly concludes that knowing where to look was essential to his finding of the wallet, while another possible scenario may have been that he looked at where he thought his wallet was, but it wasn't there.
See Also