Historians and conceptual change in history itself: The domain as a unit of analysis

Abstract

<p>Along their path towards expertise, historians undergo conceptual changes. The purpose of this theoretical paper is to argue that conceptual change in history involves, first, a fundamental shift from an understanding of history as <em>the past</em> to an understanding of history as <em>human production</em>. And second, expert conceptual change involves understanding multiple approaches to the production of history. Each approach is associated with constraints on historical concepts and meta-concepts. We outline differences and similarities between these broad approaches through a framework that merges epistemic cognition and historical theory. Currently, there exists no singular conception of history to set as an unproblematic aim of epistemic education, and conceptual change must therefore embrace the aim of understanding of multiple conceptions.</p>