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The Welch Review

Politics, philosophy, and the ideas underneath them

There ought to be a word for it

There's no good English word for the specific error of treating a decision that was never put to anyone as though it had been ratified. "Naturalising" is close but carries too much theoretical freight. "Path dependence" describes the mechanism, not the mistake of reading the mechanism as consent.

I keep needing the word and keep having to write the sentence out.

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