What is temporal reasoning?

Temporal reasoning is a concept in personal epistemology: Something can be true now and have been false before without contradiction.

Example: In 2022, your team's best practice was to avoid microservices and keep the monolith — the codebase was small, the team was four people, and coordination costs dwarfed any scaling benefit. In 2025, the team is forty people, the monolith deploys take an hour, and microservices are the obvious move. A new hire reads your 2022 architecture decision record and says, 'This contradicts our current strategy.' It does not. Both positions were correct — at different times. The variable that changed was scale. The contradiction dissolves the moment you add a timestamp to each claim.

This concept is part of Phase 19 (Contradiction Resolution) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for contradiction resolution.