Hey what’s up Thinkers! Kathy Gibbens here! How are you doing today? I hope you’re doing well & I hope you’re ready to learn how to think better just a little bit today.
Let’s start off with a quick review of a fallacy covered earlier in the podcast: Personal Incredulity. And yes, that’s a hard one for me to pronounce. Incredulity comes from the word incredulous, which means “unwilling or unable to believe something”. So Personal Incredulity is when someone concludes something to be untrue just b/c they can’t imagine it being true. Or when someone has a hard time understanding something, so they just decide it can’t possibly be true since it’s so hard to understand.
Question to ask yourself: “Does the fact that I don’t believe it or understand it really make it false?” *or we could say it this way* “Does the fact that I don’t believe it or understand it really make it true?”
If you want to hear more about this fallacy, check out Episode 39.
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Ok, let’s dive into the new fallacy for today: The Historian’s Fallacy. The Historian’s Fallacy happens when people look back at something that happened in the past and judge the people’s actions & decisions based on the knowledge or information that’s available now, but wasn’t available then.
Here’s another example: Let’s say you buy a stock and a week later, the company goes out of business. Your friend makes a dig at you saying, “Boy, you sure know how to pick ‘em, don’t you! I could have seen that coming from a mile away!” Ok, really, wise guy? There’s no way someone could know what’s going to happen in the future to a company that they’re not on the inside of.
I actually committed the Historian’s Fallacy fallacy not too long ago! My husband and I were driving up to the airport and chose to take the highway instead of the back roads. On the drive up, we encountered a back-up. There had been an accident and traffic was stalled for miles. I said, “Oh man, we’re going to be late! We totally should have taken the backroads and we wouldn’t be stuck in this traffic! What a dumb decision” Ok, do you see the fallacy here? We couldn’t have known that there was going to be an accident on the highway but here I was, judging our decision to take the highway based on knowledge that wasn’t available at the time, but is available now.
David Hackett Fischer, is the American historian who coined the phrase “historian’s fallacy”. The example he observed was the claim that the United States should have seen the many warning signs & anticipated Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. However, according to Fischer, those signs seem obvious only in hindsight—to the WW2 leaders at the time, many of those warning signs seemed like the attack could have come on many positions other than Pearl Harbor.
Have you ever heard the phrase, “Hindsight is 20/20”? That totally fits with this fallacy. There’s no way we can assume that the people knew then what we know now…b/c it’s impossible. They didn’t! That’s the problem with the thinking behind this fallacy - we can’t hold people responsible for information that hadn’t come out yet, or for the outcomes that they couldn’t have known about at the time they were alive.
This is why it’s so important, when you’re studying history, to read original texts that were written by the people who were alive & involved in historical events, and not just read books written by people who are alive today as they look back and make judgments on those historical events. You HAVE to get inside the mind of the people who were alive at the time. I’ve heard it said this way: “It’s better to read living books written by dead authors than to read dead books written by living authors.” In other words, it’s saying that it’s better to read a book written by someone who was alive at the time the event was happening than to read the book written by someone who is alive today, but wasn't there when the event was happening.
Question to ask yourself: “Is this really something they could have known was going to happen or is that just the benefit of hindsight?” *repeat*
Join me in tomorrow’s episode where I'm going to tell you about a slight variation of this fallacy.
And Remember: When you learn HOW to think, you will no longer fall prey to those who are trying to tell you what THEY want you to think and it all starts with asking one simple question: “Is that really true?”
