The Construction of the Relation Between National Past and present in the Appropriation of Historical Master Narratives.

Master narratives about national history have been recognized as powerful cultural tools, influencing both historical understanding and national identity construction. For example, by the work of James Wertsch and studies on national history representation from a sociocultural point of view. However, the appropriation of these narratives needs to be considered in more detail for a clearer picture of how the nation is imagined and how this representation could change. In this paper a contribution is made by analyzing how the relation between past and present is constructed in master narrative representation, based on interviews with high school students narrating national history and presidential discourse commemorating it. It is proposed that the relation between past and present is constructed in three ways: past and present are identified; the past is idealized and their relation is teleologically constructed. By looking at how past and present are related in representations of the national past, the functioning of national historical myths as cultural tool becomes more clear. This contributes to clarifying how the master narrative constrains historical understanding and how it might enable national identification processes.

Conceptual change, crucial experiments and auxiliary hypotheses. A theoretical contribution.

Theories about conceptual change have been generally related to historical and philosophical analysis of science. Yet, there is still much debate on how ideas coming from the history of science and their implications can be applied in this field. Our study intends to investigate the complex structure of conceptual change, by making use of some particularly representative features of the History and Philosophy of science, while considering the structure of so-called crucial experiments and the specific role of implicit hypotheses. Due to their historical importance and logical reasoning aspects, examining these issues may contribute to understand how conceptual change may take place.