Retrospective Determinism
Creeping Determinism
The argument that because an event has occurred under some circumstance, the circumstance must have made its occurrence inevitable.
Origin
French philosopher Henri Bergson coined the term "retrospective determinism" as the informal fallacy whereby an event's occurrence is retroactively interpreted as inevitable, disregarding genuine uncertainties and alternative outcomes perceptible at the time. In 1975, psychologist Fischhoff developed methods for investigating hindsight bias, then called the "creeping determinism hypothesis," finding that the more one establishes strong antecedent-event relations, the more inevitable and foreseeable the event appears in retrospect. The fallacy fosters illusions in law (flawed judicial reasoning) and economics (market determinism), ignoring policy interventions, behavioral factors, and stochastic variables.