>[!abstract] >The historian's fallacy is an informal fallacy that occurs when one assumes that decision makers of the past viewed events from the same perspective and having the same information as those subsequently analyzing the decision. It is not to be confused with presentism, a similar but distinct mode of historical analysis in which present-day ideas (such as moral standards) are projected into the past. The idea was first articulated by British literary critic Matthew Arnold in 1880 and later named and defined by American historian David Hackett Fischer in 1970 (Wikipedia, 2025). >[!quote] >The course of development of a nation’s language, thought, and poetry, is profoundly interesting; and by regarding a poet’s work as a stage in this course of development we may easily bring ourselves to make it of more importance as poetry than in itself it really is, we may come to use a language of quite exaggerated praise in criticising it; in short, to overrate it. So arises in our poetic judgments the fallacy caused by the estimate which we may call historic ([[Arnold, 1880]]). >[!related] >- **North** (upstream): [[Chronocentrism]] >- **West** (similar): [[Chronological snobbery]] >- **East** (different): — >- **South** (downstream): [[Hindsight bias]]