historical fallacy
an error of interpretation in which one reads into a process, either as a cause or an essential element, what only comes about as the result of the process. For example, a man has lost his wallet but can think of several places where he might have left it. When he finds it in the first place that he looks, he assumes falsely that he knew where the wallet was all along. His error is to suppose that a state of affairs arising from the process of looking (knowing where the wallet is) was in fact the cause of the process. The term was introduced by John Dewey in his classic paper, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (1896), where he argued that psychology was committing this fallacy in its attempts to isolate one set of events termed responses from another set termed stimuli and to show that the former result from the latter. See also reverse causality.