Historical Fallacy
A set of considerations is thought to hold good only because a completed process is read into the content of the process which conditions this completed result.
Origin
The term was named by American philosopher John Dewey in his 1938 work Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. Dewey identified it as a form of backward reasoning in which a completed outcome is read back into the process that produced it — treating the endpoint of an inquiry as if it were already present in the starting conditions. The error, he argued, was endemic to philosophy and the social sciences, distorting historical analysis by projecting later knowledge onto earlier moments that could not have possessed it. Pragmatism's insistence that inquiry is forward-looking and genuinely open was Dewey's direct counter to the fallacy.