Historical Reasoning: The Interplay of Domain-Specific and Domain-General Aspects

In this chapter, we explore the question of domain-general and domain-specific aspects of reasoning in history. Historical reasoning is a form of informal reasoning. There are no single procedures to reach a conclusion and there is no single clear-cut or correct solution. History deals with events that have already happened, in a time that is different from ours. This has important implications for reasoning. In order to construct a historical explanation one needs to explore the historical context and to identify actions and motives of people in the past, as well as to identify developments and societal structures as potential causes and describe how these causes ‘produced’ the event under inspection. Claims and conclusions about historical phenomena need to be supported by evidence. Historical evidence, however, is often mediated through other people (living in another time), incomplete and uncertain. Reasoning might be domain-specific because it is strongly determined by declarative and procedural knowledge that is unique in a discipline, or because the reasoning tasks are unique. Domain-specificity can also be the result of the fact that it appears within a particular epistemic domain. Each domain has its own means and standards of justification. Using insights from both philosophy of history and history education research, we discuss reasoning tasks that are considered characteristic for the discipline of history. For each type of task we address the question of how researchers conceptualize the role of domain-specific declarative, procedural, and epistemic knowledge. We will illustrate the interplay of domain-general and domain-specific aspects with examples from students’ reasoning in the context of collaborative learning tasks.