Meanings
- uncountableThe tendency to explain everything as based on a single cause.
Don't think that the Gini coefficient alone will describe the situation, however; this would be succumbing to monocausotaxophilia, the love of single ideas that explain everything, one of humanity's most common cognitive errors.
2020, Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future2 more examples
There is increasing evidence (Levy 1974, 1984, forthcoming) that it is the exchange of information between right-brain and left-brain modes which constitutes what various researchers have called the human “cognitive imperative, "the 'aha' or 'eureka' moment, monocausotaxophilia, "or the "what is it" syndrome: the human capacity to make sense of the world.
1986, Oral Tradition, page 79One might argue that storytelling itself is the answer arrived at by epic—but this would be to fall into the monocausotaxophilia—my friend Ernst Pöppel's term for the love of single causes that explain everything—that is the temptation of science.
2012, Frederick Turner, Epic: Form, Content, and History, page 152
Origin
Coined by Ernst Pöppel, as a joke, but picked up and popularized by others.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
monocausotaxophilia. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 5, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/monocausotaxophilia
“monocausotaxophilia.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/monocausotaxophilia. Accessed November 5, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “monocausotaxophilia,” accessed November 5, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/monocausotaxophilia.
Source: monocausotaxophilia on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.