The Historical fallacy, also called the psychological fallacy, is a logical fallacy originally described by philosopher John Dewey in 1896. The historical fallacy occurs when "a set of considerations which hold good only because a completed process is read into the content of the process which conditions this completed result." [1] More simply stated, one commits the historical fallacy when one reads into a process the results that occur because of that process.
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A person coming across a loaf of bread without knowing the process by which bread is made, might begin to try to understand how to make bread by analyzing only its ingredients. Finding that bread contains a large amount of gas, one might conclude that gas is an ingredient used in making bread. However, a baker does not add gas into bread. Rather yeast creates a chemical process that causes the bread to rise with bubbles of carbon dioxide gas. The fallacy is in not recognizing that the gas is a result of the process of making bread and not a preexisting ingredient used to make it. Completed results supervene upon processes that are not necessarily reducible to the parts of that process.
The historical fallacy has implication in analytic philosophy and metalogic. For instance many analytic philosophers apply logic to metaphysical questions without inquiring into the metaphysical processes underlying logic. Thus many process theorists might contend that much of analytic philosophy is undermined by the historical fallacy.