Abstract

GONZALEZ NAVARRO, María. EPISTEMOLOGY, REASONING AND COGNITION IN THE CONSTRUCTIVISM VS. RECONSTRUCTIVISM HISTORIOGRAPHICAL DEBATE. Univ. philos. [online]. 2011, vol.28, n.57, pp.163-187. ISSN 0120-5323.

Some authors sustain that historical research is an effect of a specific historiographical context (Jenkins, 1991; González de Oleaga, 2009). An approach to the historiographical debate between constructivism and recontructivism is presented in this paper. Two theses are here defended. The first one affirms that the above mentioned debate is deeply related to epistemological questions (study of mental representations, different conceptions about historical reasoning functions, historical reasoning, cognitive bias, and informal falacies). The second thesis affirms that each historiographical conception can be understood as the effect of assuming a specific perspective about these epistemic questions. As an evidence of this, some connections between historiography and epistemology will be analysed through the analogy between the reconstructivism vs. constructivism debate, and the epistemological debate detectivism vs. constitutivism (Finkelstein, 2003).

Keywords : historiography; cognitive bias; historical reasoning; defeasible inferences; social cognition.

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