AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

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 has not been systematically researched. Recent philosophical psychology is dominated by works that investigate cognitive tools used by intuitive historians – such as episodic memory, mental time travel, concepts of time, or causal reasoning – 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 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 use these assumptions to develop their inquiries into past entities.