Learning history and biology involves declarative knowledge; establishing facts, categorizing these facts in some way and then attempting to explain why they are way they are. What is involved here is concept development, ie the development of categories for making sense of our world and theories for predicting how things will behave. We use our concepts to identify phenomena, but we also change these concepts in the light of the new phenomena we discover, or because we start to view phenomena differently. Our concepts define what we perceive, but what we perceive also should define our concepts. Concepts are useful cognitive tools because they allow us to organize information such that we can retain it and use it more efficiently.

We can develop concepts implicitly without conscious awareness just by picking up and generalizing patterns from our experience. This is usually based on the learning process we refer to as induction. For example, a learner who has had a lot of exposure to a language may induce or 'work out' a grammatical rule, such as the German 'Verb-second' rule, without ever being aware of doing so.

We may also engage in inductive reasoning explicitly, when we deliberately try to find a concept or category to explain certain 'facts'. Explicit inductive reasoning might go something like this:

But we may also work through explicit deduction, that is, using a rule or law we have learned to predict how particular phenomena will behave: