presentism
1
9.9
- noun
- /ˈprɛzəntɪzəm/
- Formal
- Since bishops did not have today's knowledge and experience to guide their decisions, Pilarczyk identified attempts to judge bishops by today's standards as the fallacy of "presentism."
Examples
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Some historians have warned against presentism when analyzing past social movements, emphasizing the importance of understanding their original contexts.
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Many scholars criticize the concept of presentism, arguing that it distorts our understanding of historical events by interpreting them through modern perspectives.
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At the time Body of Power was published, one of the dominant ways of accounting for the African present was presentism.
Academic text (2010) -
This is yet another example of presentism, where the poster can't understand that people in the past thought differently and looked at things differently than the way we do now.
Blog text (13) -
These people are guilty of presentism and judge acts of the past by today’s enlightened behavior.
Blog text (27) -
To simplify greatly, presentism in the practice of history refers to the disfavored tendency to read the events of the past "in terms of present concerns" rather than placing them in their rich and highly contingent context.
Academic text (2017) -
Using those vintage film "documents" for learning history, however, requires removing one layer of interpretation that Marcus et al. (2010) called "presentism." They define that term as, "a mode of historical thought in which present-day ideas and attitudes are anachronistically introduced into depictions of the past or are used to evaluate or judge what happened in the past" (p. 146).
Academic text (2014) -
In debates about the interpretation of historical texts, presentism is often highlighted as a significant flaw that can misrepresent the intentions of the authors.
Surface Forms
Morphology
Etymology
The word presentism comes from the English word present meaning 'now' and the ending -ism meaning 'a belief'. So presentism is the belief that prophecies are happening 'now', which is why people with this view read current events as signs of the Apocalypse.