I've been seeing arguments of this form for awhile:
- (agreed true premise) Some predicate P was applicable to behavior/event/thing A in the past. Variations: P(A) may have been true at some particular past time t, or over all past time T.
- (fallacious consequence) Therefore P(A) is true now. Variations: P(A) must be true now and all futures.
But I haven't known what to call them (e.g., when "calling out" their utterers). The problem seems to me to be due to ignoring (empirical) context and quantity (but has nothing to do with logical quantification). Some examples:
- Mass immigration was "good for America" in its (past) history. Therefore mass immigration must be "good for America" now. (P=
good for America
, A=mass immigration
) - (even more logically problematic) Humans have been burning fossil fuels for centuries, and "there was no crisis then." Therefore, to claim that fossil fuel combustion is "a crisis now, one must believe that we've been in crisis for centuries." (P=
not crisis-producing
, A=fossil fuel combustion
)
Does this fallacy (or cognitive bias, but this failure "feels logical" to me--ICBW) have a widely-accepted name? Given the extensive and systematic attention to logic and rhetoric over millenia, I suspect this has been previously taxonomized.