Voss, James F., Joseph Ciarrochi, and Mario Carretero. “Causality in History: On the ‘Intuitive’ Understanding of the Concepts of Sufficiency and Necessity.” In International Review of History Education Volume 2: Learning and Reasoning in History, edited by J. F. Voss & M. Carretero, 199- 213. Portland, OR: Woburn Press, 1998.
An area of research that has been of interest of late has been the study of how individuals, who are particularly naive in a certain domain, perform tasks in that particular subject matter, such as physics. Generally, the results of the studies have concluded that naive individuals have intuitive concepts that are related to the domain but they are sometimes in conflict with the actual domain. Nonetheless, the majority of work in the field has been completed in mathematics and sciences. Therefore, the authors wish to study the domain of history and how their research is concerned with the naive perceptions of causality in history. The authors state that the study of causality in history is both important and controversial as it can be used to discuss how certain conditions can possibly play roles in producing historical events, which adds to our understanding of history. Yet it also is controversial as it does not simply involve cause and effect relationships, but rather a myriad of actions and events that occur over time. The study the authors discuss in this chapter pertains to two concepts that are important to the notion of causation in history, sufficiency and necessity. Their study was focused on how naive individuals personally perceived a given historical event as either sufficient or necessary and how individual difference variables could be related to an individual’s differing perception. The authors discuss what constitutes sufficiency and necessity in the study of causality in history and how individuals in the study perceived each of the concepts. They also discuss the methodology of their study and how each of the concepts and the materials and procedures of the study were explained to the subjects. The chapter concludes with the instructional implications of the authors’ research for the teaching and learning of history.
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