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Retrospective determinism is the informal fallacy that because something happened under some circumstances, it was therefore bound to happen due to those circumstances; the term was coined by the French philosopher Henri Bergson. For example:
When he declared himself dictator of the Roman Republic, Julius Caesar was bound to be assassinated.
Were this an argument, it would give no rational grounds on which to conclude that Caesar's assassination was the only possible outcome, or even the most likely outcome under the circumstances. This type of fallacy can precede a hasty generalization: because something happened in given circumstances, it was not only bound to happen, but will in fact always happen given those circumstances. For example:
Caesar was assassinated when he declared himself dictator. Sic semper tyrannis: this goes to show that all dictators will eventually be assassinated.
Not only is this irrational, it is factually false.
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known widely and were retrospectively attributed to Whorf and Sapir although the second formulation, verging on linguistic determinism, was never advanced...
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geography" and other pseudoscientific theories of historical and geographic determinism. Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914) was a frequent commentator on world...
association of ideas. Hume's compatibilist theory of free will takes causal determinism as fully compatible with human freedom. His philosophy of religion, including...
, some notions of free will posit that free will is compatible with determinism, while others do not). Dennett insists that many important and common...
the statistical methods and cultural motivations underlying biological determinism, the belief that "the social and economic differences between human groups—primarily...
and Jerome Kagan were generally concerned with the concept of infant determinism (nature versus nurture), stressing the effects of later experience on...
their situation (which is often seen as predetermined due to biological determinism, evolutionary genetics or a rigged game), a sense of futility and nihilism...
of a system based on knowledge gathered during its past and present. Determinism is a philosophical theory holding that causal determination can predict...
Biology (Editor) 1981, Allison & Busby, ISBN 0850314259 Against Biological Determinism (Editor), 1982, Schocken, ISBN 0805281126 Not in Our Genes (With Richard...
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the introduction of genetics, eugenics became associated with genetic determinism, the belief that human character is entirely or in the majority caused...
philosophy of physics, involves issues such as the nature of space and time, determinism, and metaphysical outlooks such as empiricism, naturalism and realism...
paradigms has been advanced, particularly by Giovanni Dosi. In a 2015 retrospective on Kuhn, the philosopher Martin Cohen describes the notion of the paradigm...
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