The Intuitive Historian: An Inquiry Into the Philosophical Psychology of Intuitive Historical Thinking

People use their commonsense thinking about the past to inform their decisions. Intuitive historical thinking is therefore pervasive in the social and cognitive lives of humans. This type of cognition, however, has not been systematically researched. Recent philosophical psychology is dominated by works that investigate cognitive tools used by intuitive historical thinking – such as episodic memory, mental time travel, causal reasoning, and time-related concepts – without directly studying intuitive historical thinking. To remediate this lacuna, we investigate intuitive historical thinking, referred to as “intuitive history.” We argue against the view that intuitive history can be reduced to any one of the cognitive tools used by intuitive history. The processes and phenomenology of intuitive history, we suggest, are linked to three types of interrelated activities routinely conducted by intuitive historians: managing historical information perceived as significant, which includes searching, gathering, storing, and updating information about the past; the interpretation of historical information, which may include the intuitive historian’s distinctive experiences, assumptions, emotions, and evaluations; and the use of historical information. Interpretative processes can be influenced by the assumption of pastness, singularity, reality, connectivity or causation, and significance. We review evidence suggesting that intuitive historians routinely and spontaneously use these assumptions to develop their inquiries into past entities. The evidence we discuss concerns identification, kinship and other social lineages, contamination, ownership, causation and counterfactual reasoning, and cooperation. We conclude with future directions in research and philosophical theorizing about intuitive history.