Fallacy of prescience
Encyclopedia
The fallacy of prescience is a term used by Smith, DeShaye and Stoicheff to describe an erroneous exploratory research technique in which the experimental scaffolding embeds assumptions about what will be discovered. The example cited describes a common practice in Humanities Computing in which an XML
database and schema are designed at the outset of a research project to annotate a document as a means of discovering the structural relationships within the subject text. The fallacy, they say, arises from the fact that some inferences must be made about the structures that will be discovered in order to construct the schema that will describe them. The fallacy of prescience can be viewed as a procedural manifestation of the informal fallacy
of begging the question
.
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
database and schema are designed at the outset of a research project to annotate a document as a means of discovering the structural relationships within the subject text. The fallacy, they say, arises from the fact that some inferences must be made about the structures that will be discovered in order to construct the schema that will describe them. The fallacy of prescience can be viewed as a procedural manifestation of the informal fallacy
Informal fallacy
An informal fallacy is an argument whose stated premises fail to support their proposed conclusion. The deviation in an informal fallacy often stems from a flaw in the path of reasoning that links the premises to the conclusion...
of begging the question
Begging the question
Begging the question is a type of logical fallacy in which the proposition to be proven is assumed implicitly or explicitly in the premise....
.