Post hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin: “after, therefore”) is an informal error that states: “Since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X.” It is often simply reduced to a post-hoc fallacy. As a logical error of the questionable variety of causes, it differs subtly from the hoc ergo propter hoc error (“with this, that is, because of that”), in which two events occur simultaneously or the chronological order is insignificant or unknown. Post hoc is a logical error where an event appears to be the cause of a subsequent event because it occurred earlier. [1] Is post hoc ergo propter hoc rationalization the same as post-hoc rationalization or is there a difference? All the sources I seem to find only mention post-hoc rationalization as alternative names, but someone told me they were different. , but post-hoc rationalization is about reinterpreting something in order to adapt it to the knowledge found. For example: A good researcher must consider other factors; Maybe your friend has a weaker immune system or smokes too many cigarettes. The reasoning process led you to a reasonable assumption and helped you avoid post-hoc reasoning, but you still need to test the hypothesis exhaustively. The search for the causes of diseases is full of post-hoc examples. Not only are medical researchers constantly looking for causes or cures for medical conditions, but patients are also on the lookout for anything that could help relieve their symptoms.
In some cases, there is also a desire to find a cause outside of genetics or happiness that can be blamed for health or developmental problems. In the post hoc version of inflated causality, the proposed idea attempts to reduce an event to a single cause, when in reality the event is more complex. However, the idea is not entirely wrong, which is why it is called inflated and not just completely imperfect. For example, each of these explanations is incomplete: Post hoc (an abbreviated form of post hoc, ergo propter hoc) is a logical error in which an event is named as the cause of a subsequent event simply because it occurred earlier. “While two events may follow one another,” says Madsen Pirie in “How to Win Every Argument,” “we cannot simply assume that one would not have happened without the other.” The Latin expression post hoc, ergo propter hoc can be translated literally as “after, that is, therefore”. The concept can also be called erroneous causation, error of the wrong cause, reasoning from succession alone or supposed causality. Tags: Empiricism • Intuition • Jonathan Haidt • Knowledge • Post-hoc rationalization • Psychology • Rationalization You have a bad cold and take a known remedy. A few days later, you feel better and thanks to post-hoc considerations, you are convinced that the remedy worked. Happily, decide to buy this medicine the next time you have a cold. However, there are cases where they overlap, such as: For lucky charms: If someone achieves some kind of success by wearing a lucky charm and attributes their success to the lucky charm, this is both post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning (“I put the lucky charm on before achieving success, so charm must have caused my success”) and post-hoc reasoning (“My success proves, as I thought, that good luck charms work”). The form of the post-hoc error is expressed as follows: the long search for the cause of malaria has been strewn with post-hoc errors.
“It has been observed that people who go out at night often develop the disease. According to the best post-hoc reasoning, night air was thought to be the cause of malaria, and elaborate precautions were taken to exclude it from dormitories,” explained author Stuart Chase in “Guides to Straight Thinking.” However, some scientists were skeptical of this theory. A long series of experiments finally proved that malaria was caused by the bite of the Anopheles mosquito. The night air entered the scene only because mosquitoes preferred to attack in the dark. Their descriptions of “post hoc ergo propter hoc” and “post hoc reasoning” seem correct. It seems strange to treat them as synonymous, since post-hoc reasoning (like the Qur`an describing black holes) is not necessarily a matter of causality, as is always post hoc ergo propter hoc. Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena in education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan views. Kuklinski calls this kind of reaction the “I know I`m right” syndrome and sees it as a “potentially huge problem” in a democratic system.
“This implies not only that most people will refuse to correct their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that those who most need to correct them are the least likely to do so.” To explain this persistence, Haidt invokes an evolutionary hypothesis: we are competing for social status, and the decisive advantage in this struggle is the ability to influence others. Reason has evolved in this light to help us turn, not to help us learn. So if you want to change people`s minds, Haidt concludes, don`t appeal to their reason. Appeal to the head of reason: the underlying moral intuitions, whose conclusions reason defends. According to this person, Post hoc ergo propter hoc is something like that. I remember he used to deny evolution with a Christian friend mentioned above. I used to beat him with facts and reason, which was greeted with strong cognitive dissonance and solidification of the point of view. I have not convinced him otherwise. However, he had a conversation with theistic evolutionary biologist Simon Conway-Morris, who managed to convince him otherwise by several emails in which he presented the same evidence as I did.
The economy is a complex issue, so it can be wrong to attribute a particular event to a single cause, whether it`s the latest unemployment statistics or the policies that are the magic fuel for economic growth. Of course, this is discouraging for people like me who have set out to change people`s minds through rational discourse while presenting empirical evidence. What it actually seems to do is anchor people in their original beliefs instead of changing their minds. As Joe Keohane says, post hoc is a mistake because correlation is not the same as causation. You can`t blame your friends for a rain delay just because every time they go to a ball game with you, it storms and the game is delayed. Similarly, just because a pitcher buys new socks before launching a raffle doesn`t mean the new socks speed up the toss of a pitcher. In reality, it may not have been seafood; You also ate and drank other foods. The plate could have been dirty or the illness could have been caused by something you ate in the morning. When B is undesirable, this pattern is often combined with the formal error of denying the previous one, assuming that the logical opposite is true: avoiding A prevents B.[4] The problem is that without this drug, you recovered just as quickly. The remedy may even have made you take longer to get better; There`s really no way to know.
Post-hoc rationalization is what most of us end up doing when we argue. We have an instinctive feeling, a potentially irrational or a-rational decision based on the underlying cognitive abilities associated with our whole person: physical reactions and gut feelings. The excellent Jonathan Haidt, philosophical psychologist, has done a lot of research in this area. As the New York Times writes in a review of his book The Righteous Mind: For those of you who haven`t seen that absolutely brilliant TED talk by David Pisarro, do it now. It shows how we judge morally based on intuition, the idea of which is that we rationalize this “decision” after the fact. Abdominal reaction first, think about the reasons later. In search of the reasons for the increase in crime, an article in the “New York Times” by Sewell Chan titled “Are iPods to blame for the rise in crime?” September 27, 2007) reviewed a report that seemed to blame iPods: What`s going on? How can we do things so badly and be so sure that we are right? Part of the answer lies in how our brains are wired. In general, people tend to look for consistency. There is a considerable amount of psychological research showing that people tend to interpret information in a way that reinforces their pre-existing views. When we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs and actively reject information that doesn`t. This is called “motivated thinking.” Regardless of whether the consistent information is correct or not, we can accept it as fact, as a confirmation of our beliefs. This makes us more confident in these beliefs and even less likely to entertain facts that contradict them.
In most cases, this was not the case. The participants, who identified as conservative, believed in misinformation about weapons of mass destruction and taxes even more strongly after receiving the correction. With these two topics, the more the participant cares about the subject – a factor known as salience – the stronger the setback. The effect was somewhat different with self-proclaimed liberals: when they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn`t backfire, but readers always ignored the uncomfortable fact that the Bush administration`s restrictions were not complete.
