ABSTRACT
Reconstructionism and its positivist model-making derivative, constructionist history, rely ultimately on a shared belief in both the epistemological integrity of empiricism and a recoverable past reality ‘out there’. This chapter reviews the complex approach to acquiring historical knowledge prior to examining the issues raised for deconstructionist history. Truthful historical descriptions may be taken to depend upon one or more of three kinds of inference: first, that most favoured by reconstructionist/constructionist historians and labeled as the hypothesis-deduction-data-induction method, or the loop of explanation and evidence; second, statistical probability; and finally, the deconstructive notion of historical justifications derived and implied by historian's narratives. Constructionism covers a variety of impositionalist approaches to the study of the past, but all share the reconstructionist's belief that historical knowledge corresponds to the reality being studied.
