Abstract
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).