The Historical Fallacy
by Chris Ott
Download this file as a PDF
For those who wish to have a deeper understanding of causation, the two most important concepts are the sanskara and the historical fallacy. People seem to have more trouble understanding the historical fallacy than sanskaras, so this is an attempt to make it clear.
Like all fallacies, the historical fallacy is a mistake in reasoning, though it is not committed consciously. It is committed in cases where someone is proposing a cause for something in their experience. So it's really a cause problem. It occurs especially when people try to explain how something came about or came into being.
Examples: How did that stain get on the rug? Where does air come from? How did life originate?
The fallacy is made when something in the thing being explained, winds up in the explanation for that thing.
So here are a couple examples of people doing just that:
Greek atomists proposed that things like pebbles are made of tinier pebbles called atoms. The cause of pebbles is pebbles.
The modern Big Bang theory proposes that the cause of space, time, and number was an event that they conceive of in terms of space, time, and number.
Here's another way the historical fallacy could be worded:
The historical fallacy is committed when a proposed cause of something has in it the thing it is proposed to be the cause of.
Take Freud's explanation for complexes. It's the Oedipal complex. The cause of complexes is a complex.
Or take M. Scott Peck's conception of the cause of evil. It's caused by something called "evil."
Or take a popular notion of how life on Earth originated. It was brought here by aliens. The explanation for Earthly life forms is another life form. The ancient explanation of where people came from was they were created by gods, who of course were simply bigger people.
Plato's idea of forms was that shapes like triangles and horses in our experience were possible due to an ideal archetype triangle and horse in the invisible form world.
Materialism is the view that we can explain the cause of stuff we see by postulating another stuff we can't see that is analogous to it. So the cause of stuff is another stuff, imagined to be pretty much exactly like the stuff it causes that you can see, except you can't see it.
The importance of understanding the historical fallacy is that when people commit it while forming an hypothesis to explain something, they wind up no closer to an explanation. In fact, they wind up with more to explain than they began with - as they wind up with the explanatory same thing (on top of the one being explained) to explain. This is one of the main complaints agnostics raise when objecting to simplistic concepts of God. "But who made God?" Yet this mistake is far and away more pervasive than anyone has recognized thus far. As pointed out above, it is as much in materialism and Freud's atheism as it is in primitive theism.
Meher Baba handily solves this problem of causation by explaining to mankind the notion of the sanskara in greater detail than it has ever been explained before. The sanskara accounts for human complexes, for the arisal of so-called "matter," so-called "evil," as well as the appearance of life, consciousness, space, time, number, language, fear, desire, and so on. Literally everything in experience, potential or reified, can be explained in terms of stages of causation by the evolution of consciousness in terms of the operation of sanskaras.
On top of its place in dnyana marga (the path of knowledge) of giving to the aspirant in vivid clarity the cause of his suffering and ignorance and the road to his salvation, the notion of the historical fallacy, coupled with that of the sanskara, is relevant to issues of philosophy of science, psychology, metaphysics, history, anthropology, epistemology, theology, cosmology, economics, philosophy of language, and so forth.
historical fallacy: "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." The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology, John Dewey, 1896
An even more basic habit of thought that creates false judgments is at the heart of even the historical fallacy. This habit (perhaps we can call it 'reading in' or 'projection of a world view') is even more general and more subtle. This occurs when the content of the lens you are looking through (derived from some other experience) is read into the content of that which you are seeing. It causes the impression that your interpretation of the content of your experience is a priori or obvious or common sense or beyond question. In fact the person who commits this error in his thinking is reading into the content of his experience that which he already unwittingly presupposes and is thus finding it there. This habit is the heart and soul of Maya - the principle of ignorance that causes one to consider something to be other than what it is (GmG p.204).
At its heart we could say that this habit is one of reading content from one experience into the content of another experience where it does not exist. I have never heard the root of this habit (which is most fundamentally a perceptual operation since it is not a conscious discursive one) addressed directly in western literature, although there are numerous references to its effects upon misjudgments. For instance
psychologists can speak eloquently about transference and projection, but can not say a single word about the operations of the mind that cause these phenomena. Although Maya (and its working part the sanskara) has not been recognized as a principle in Western thought until now, numerous of the most high minded Western philosophers of the last two centuries have come exceedingly close to recognizing its fundamental presence without being able to give it a name. Friedrich Nietzsche made an early attempt to outline this operation in human thought in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and Meher Baba went so far as to say that Nietzsche was a prophet of his time, but that he did not know what he was prophesying (LM 6534 footnote). This habit of reading into is much more explicitly articulated later on by Oswald Spengler, here writing at the end of WWI.
Now, at last, it is possible to take the decisive step of sketching an image of history that is independent of the accident of standpoint, of the period in which this or that observer lives - independent too of the personality of the observer himself, who as an interested member of his own Culture is tempted, by its religious, intellectual, political and social tendencies, to order the material of history according to a perspective that is limited as to both space and time, and to fashion arbitrary forms into which the superficies of history can be forced but which are entirely alien to its inner content. (Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. I, Alfred A Knopf, Inc 1926. p. 93)
The error in thinking that Oswald is speaking of, whereby his fellow historians unwittingly read into past cultures the prejudices and assumptions they have derived from their own, is clearly just another example of the same habit that is seen expressed in the historical fallacy. They are both the habit of reading mental conditioning derived from an earlier experience into a new experience to which those conditions do not apply. They are simply two expressions of the same human habit. And it is, at its heart, a habit of thinking that supervenes on the subconscious process of the sanskaras. Man reads the conditioning of his sanskaras into the content of his experience.
Further reading
For more on sanskaras and their relation to thought and action see Defining Sanskaras.
For more on the historical fallacy see my chapter on the topic in Essentials of a Spiritual Metaphysics.
