The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the epistemic position of psychiatry between the science of general laws in relation to frequently encountered generality and the science of specific events which is directed towards the particular. In this respect the development of the dichotomy of nomothetic and idiographic methodology from its generally forgotten neo-Kantian origins is delineated within the context of a historical-philosophical analysis and then its incorporation into psychology and psychopathology is reconstructed. In the course of this (...) analysis and also in the discussion of the currently accepted theories of analytical philosophy and critical rationalism it becomes clear that, in spite of widespread current opinions to the contrary, individualizing concept formation is an indispensable element in the methodological inventory of psychiatric science. (shrink)

Humeanism about laws of nature — the view that the laws reduce to the Humean mosaic — is a popular view, but currently existing versions face powerful objections. The non-supervenience objection, the non-fundamentality objection and the explanatory circularity objection have all been thought to cause problems for the Humean. However, these objections share a guiding thought — they are all based on the idea that there is a certain kind of divergence between the practice of science and the metaphysical picture (...) suggested by Humeanism. -/- I suggest that the Humean can respond to these objections not by rejecting this divergence, but by arguing that is appropriate. In particular the Humean can, in the spirit of Loewer (2012), distinguish between scientific and metaphysical explanation — this is motivated by differing aims of explanation in science and metaphysics. And they can further leverage this into distinctions between scientific and metaphysical fundamentality and scientific and metaphysical possibility. We can use these distinctions to respond to the objections that the Humean faces. (shrink)

Psychological universals and nomothetic aspirations of social psychology The experimental social psychology basically rejects idiographism, though its nomothetism is only sometimes similar to the one that dominates in natural traditions. This is illustrated in the paper on instances of the selected theories. They often differ from their equivalents in the natural sciences because they describe the instruments of human psychological functioning which either are non-universal or appear with various frequency in different cultural and/or historical contexts, fulfill diverse functions there, (...) and even sometimes have a different meanings. (shrink)

This article tackles issues central to most academic disciplines, including scientific boundary demarcation, the battle of the faculties, the theory of science, and the conflict between nomothetic and idiographic methodologies, that is, between the two main approaches to science. It does so through discovering and rethinking a Methodenstreit in Swedish political science, an academic dispute involving Professor Rudolf Kjellén, the father of geopolitics, and his greatest rival, Professor S. J. Boëthius. Shortly after retiring from the Johan Skytte Professorship at (...) Uppsala University, S. J. Boëthius published a great but inaccessible work on state theory and its history entitled Om statslivet (On the life of the state, 1916). The book critiques the positivistic and nomothetic (law-searching) approaches of the burgeoning social sciences, which were emancipating themselves from their father, history, and becoming independent disciplines. Boëthius critiqued the nomothetic studies of history, economics, statistics, sociology, and geopolitics for overemphasizing the significance of historical, economic, statistical, sociological, and geographical environments and structures. Thus, the exponents of these new or changing disciplines were criticized for neglecting the most important driving force of human affairs in Boëthius’s mind, namely, the power of personality and individual free will. (shrink)

Were it one's purpose to set rolling in scornful impatience the eyes of those who currently animate the discipline of personality psychology, one could scarcely do better than to initiate some discussion of the so-called "nomothetic vs. idiographic" controversy, a dispute that has nagged the field for at least the past 50 years. The author has been persuaded that the need for such an analysis will prevail for just so long as it takes the legion but, alas, ersatz "nomotheticists' (...) of personality psychology to finally get it right: The knowledge yielded by conventional' 'nomothetic' personality research has never been, is not now, and will never be nomothetic in any sense of the term to which a personality theorist would be compelled to bow. When all is said and done, it is only this dogma, as fallacious as it is resilient, that has nourished some six decades of "nomothetic" hegemony and, in the process, served repeatedly as the grounds for summarily banishing to their collective corner dispirited critics such as Allport . But while the intimidating hubris of psychometric sophisticates may heretofore have muted many who, in their alleged "romanticism" dared to challenge conventional "nomothetic" wisdom, such browbeating does not dispel ghosts—Teutonic or otherwise. There are certain essentially epistemological problems with which apologists for traditional "nomotheticism" simply must come to grips, and if prior critics of the dominant paradigm failed to articulate those problems adequately , then the struggle must be joined anew, because the problems are genuine and they are not just going to evaporate. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

This article maps a controversy in network science over the last 15 years, dividing the field about the epistemic status of a central notion, scale-freeness. The article accounts for the two main disputes, in 2005 and in 2018, as they unfolded in academic publications and on social media. This article analyzes the conflict, and the reasons why it reignited in 2018, to the surprise of many. It is argued that the concept of complex networks is shared by the distinct subcultures (...) of theorists and experimentalists; and that these subcultures have incompatible approaches to knowledge: nomothetic and idiographic. Following Galison, this article contends that network science is a trading zone where theorists and experimentalists can trade knowledge across the epistemic divide. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine phenomenologically the structure of the normative noema, which I call the “nomothetic noema.” I distinguish the meaning content, its normative characters, which I call “ductive forces”, and its modes of givenness. Next, I introduce the traditional difference between modalities de re and de dicto. I argue that the current tendency, in deontic logic, to treat deontic expressions as operators over sentences induces, at least on the syntactic surface, a de dicto reading. I then discuss (...) some of the theoretical decisions that underlie deontic logic, starting from two basic asymmetries between modal alethic logic and deontic logic. The decisive point is to recover a strong sense of permission that I equate with the factor of free agency, which is difficult to formalize. Finally, I return to the analysis of the nomothetic noema and try to show how a de re reading is better suited to account for normative intentionality. I simultaneously introduce the concept of status-imposing norms, which must be formulated with a normative use of the copulas “is” and “has.” I conclude that the treatment of normative expressions is more appropriate when they are understood as complex copulas, irreducible to assertive sentences, rather than as operators over whole sentences. I emphasize on this occasion that, from a phenomenological point of view and within the framework of genetic analysis, the primitive basic datum is the freedom of agency, on which the normative domain of assigning statuses to agents, obligations, and prohibitions is built. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Setting and Development of Neo‐Kantian Thought Windelband's Division of the Sciences: Nomothetic and Idiographic Heinrich Rickert's Theory of Historical Knowledge Cassirer's Logic of the Cultural Sciences References Further Reading.

The World Psychiatric Association has emphasised the importance of idiographic understanding as a distinct component of comprehensive assessment but in introductions to the idea it is often assimilated to the notion of narrative judgement. This paper aims to distinguish between supposed idiographic and narrative judgement. Taking the former to mean a kind of individualised judgement, I argue that it has no place in psychiatry in part because it threatens psychiatric validity. Narrative judgement, by contrast, is a genuinely distinct complement to (...) criteriological diagnosis but it is, nevertheless, a special kind of general judgement and thus can possess validity. To argue this I first examine the origin of the distinction between idiographic and nomothetic in Windelband’s 1894 rectorial address. I argue that none of three ways of understanding that distinction is tenable. Windelband’s description of historical methods, as a practical example, does not articulate a genuine form of understanding. A metaphysical distinction between particulars and general kinds is guilty of subscribing to the Myth of the Given. A distinction based on an abstraction of essentially combined aspects of empirical judgement cannot underpin a distinct empirical method. Furthermore, idiographic elements understood as individualised judgements threaten the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. In the final part I briefly describe some aspects of the logic of narrative judgements and argue that in the call for comprehensive diagnosis, narrative rather than idiographic elements have an important role. Importantly, however, whilst directed towards individual subjects, narratives are framed in intrinsically general concepts and thus can aspire to validity. (shrink)

The Contrast Between the nomothetic versus the idiographic was popularized in psychology by Gordon Allport (1937). In the early 1930s, Allport made his name by advocating for a quantitative, trait-based approach to the study of personality in contrast with the prevailing case study approach. In doing so, he was following the trend toward greater reliance on measurement in psychology as a whole. Allport, however, had grave doubts about the sufficiency of quantitative measurement for developing an understanding of individual psychological (...) functioning. The nomothetic versus the idiographic was meant to give voice to these doubts.1 For Allport, the nomothetic referred to the study of populations with the aim .. (shrink)

Psychiatry has witnessed a new wave of approaches to clinical phenotyping and the study of psychopathology, including the National Institute of Mental Health’s Research Domain Criteria, clinical staging, network approaches, the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology, and the general psychopathology factor, as well as a revival of interest in phenomenological psychopathology. The question naturally emerges as to what the relationship between these new approaches is – are they mutually exclusive, competing approaches, or can they be integrated in some way and used (...) to enrich each other? In this opinion piece, we propose a possible integration between clinical staging and phenomenological psychopathology. Domains identified in phenomenological psychopathology, such as selfhood, embodiment, affectivity, etc., can be overlaid on clinical stages in order to enrich and deepen the phenotypes captured in clinical staging (‘high resolution’ clinical phenotypes). This approach may be useful both ideographically and nomothetically, in that it could complement diagnosis, enrich clinical formulation, and inform treatment of individual patients, as well as help guide aetiological, prediction, and treatment research. The overlaying of phenomenological domains on clinical stages may require that these domains are reformulated in dimensional rather than categorial terms. This integrative project requires assessment tools, some of which are already available, that are sensitive and thorough enough to pick up on the range of relevant psychopathology. The proposed approach offers opportunities for mutual enrichment: clinical staging may be enriched by introducing greater depth to phenotypes; phenomenological psychopathology may be enriched by introducing stages of severity and disorder progression to phenomenological analysis. (shrink)

There is a fairly long-standing distinction between what are called the ideographic as opposed to nomothetic sciences. The nomothetic sciences, such as physics, offer explanations in terms of the laws and regular operations of nature. The ideographic sciences, such as natural history, cast explanations in terms of narratives. This article offers an account of what is involved in offering an explanatory narrative in the historical sciences. I argue that narrative explanations involve two chief components: a possibility space and (...) an explanatory causal mechanism. (shrink)

Ecologists typically invoke "law-like" generalizations, ranging over "structural" and/or "functional" kinds, in order to explain generalizations about "historical" kinds (such as biological taxa)rather than vice versa. This practice is justified, since structural and functional kinds tend to correlate better with important ecological phenomena than do historical kinds. I support these contentions with three recent case studies. In one sense, therefore, ecology is, and should be, more nomothetic, or law-oriented, than idiographic, or historically oriented. This conclusion challenges several recent philosophical (...) claims about the nature of ecological science. (shrink)

ABSTRACT My aim in this paper is to articulate a Foucauldian critique of scientific naturalism as well as a Foucauldian critique of the nomothetic framework underlying the Placement Problem. My Foucauldian post-structuralist critique of scientific naturalism questions the relations between our society’s imbrication of economic-political power structures and knowledge in a way that also effects some constructive critical alignment between Foucault and Habermas, helping to undermine the traditional view of their respective social critiques as incompatible. First, I will outline (...) a brief genealogical backstory for the rise of scientific naturalism, and I will then reconstruct the Placement Problem. In the second part of the paper, I introduce Foucault’s notion of pouvoir-savoir, namely his account of the interconnection between power and knowledge. I then go on to articulate the Foucauldian critique of scientific naturalism by arguing that the levelling nature of nomothetic rationality and its conservative naturalistic vocabulary involves regulative discourse: anything that resists placeability/locatability is labelled “odd”. By being thus visibly marked, “odd” phenomena become “queer” phenomena, which then become “problematic” phenomena. They are, thereby, construed in need of discipline. Understood in this Foucauldian way, scientific naturalist disciplinarity produces subjected and practised minds, “docile” minds. (shrink)

This paper examines Karl Alfred von Zittel’s practice in order to uncover the roots of so-called idiographic paleontology. The great American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) defined the discipline of idiographic paleontology as illustration and description of the morphological features of extinct species. However, this approach does not investigate macroevolutionary patterns and processes. On the contrary, the paleobiological revolution of the 1970s implemented an epistemic methodology that illustrates macrovelutionary patterns and laws by combining idiographic data with a nomothetic form (...) of explanation. This article elucidates the features of the idiographic data as well as the acquired knowledge coupled with this approach. First of all, Heinrich G. Bronn’s (1800–1862) statistical method is analyzed. Zittel’s practice arose as a reaction against the approximate conclusions reached by Bronn’s quantitative approach. Second, the details of Zittel’s methodology are described in order to bring out its peculiarities. The microscope played a pivotal role in creating and forming Zittel’s morphological data. This analysis sheds new light on the reasons behind the so-called ideographic paleontology, thus revising Gould’s historical reconstruction, as well as on the notion of paleontological data. However, even though Zittel aimed at reaching precise and stable conclusions, his data cannot be used for elucidating evolutionary mechanisms: they are scientific in a purely descriptive sense, but completely useless for biological investigations. Finally, this paper examines how Zittel’s methodology affects the contemporary paleobiological enterprise and thereby reflects upon the notion of natural history. (shrink)

The impetus driving this article is the uncritical uses of ‘culture’ as an explanatory variable in public health research of ‘suicide’, regarding its conceptualization and operationalization as a mentally riddled phenomenon clamped in nomothetic and epidemiological nomenclature. This reduction of suicide to its presumed ‘evidence based’ figures and graphs under the guise of the lingo of culture requires and yields not only ‘thin’ understandings but also non-committal conclusions. Thus, ‘culture’ merely appears as a ‘thing’ made of shared norms and (...) values that arguably can be measured, computed, and even predicted in relation to tables of suicide rates. With the aim of critically un-disciplining and unleashing these two intersecting fuzzy concepts from the straits of their epistemological habitus, we set an alternative scene of relations between them that contribute to the re-conceptualization of both. ‘Suicide cultures’, a term we coined for highlighting temporal, agentive, performative, and social justice questions of suicide and culture, place the preoccupation with mortality and terminality at its core. This turn in the analysis of public health sheds a non-perfunctory light on the cultural parameters of counting of and accounting for the incidence of suicide in different social settings. (shrink)

Conspiracy theories (CTs) are widespread ways by which people make sense of unsettling or disturbing cultural events. Belief in CTs is often connected to problematic consequences, such as decreased engagement with conventional political action or even political extremism, so understanding the psychological and social qualities of CTs belief is important. CTs have often been understood to be “monological”, displaying the tendency for belief in one conspiracy theory to be correlated with belief in (many) others. Explanations of monologicality invoke a nomothetical (...) or “closed” mindset whereby mutually supporting beliefs based on mistrust of official explanations are used to interpret public events as conspiracies, independent of the facts about those events (which they may ignore or deny). But research on monologicality offers little discussion of the content of monological beliefs and reasoning from the standpoint of the CT believers. This is due in part to the “access problem” (Wood & Douglas, 2015): CT believers are averse to being researched because they often distrust researchers and what they appear to represent. We used several strategies to address the access problem, and investigated the symbolic resources underlying CTs by reconstructing a conspiracy worldview - a set of beliefs held by CT believers about important dimensions of ontology, epistemology, and human agency. To do this, we analysed media documents, conducted field observation, and engaged in semi-structured interviews,. We describe six main dimensions of a conspiracy worldview: Views of the nature of reality, the self, the outgroup, the ingroup, action, and the future. We also describe a typology of five types of CT believers, which vary according to their positions on each of these dimensions. Our findings converge with prior explorations of CT beliefs but also revealed novel aspects: A sense of community among CT believers, a highly differentiated representation of the outgroup, a personal journey of conversion, variegated kinds of political action, and optimistic belief in future change. These findings are at odds with the typical image of monological CT believers as paranoid, cynical, anomic and irrational. For many, the CT worldview may rather constitute the ideological underpinning of a nascent pre-figurative social movement. (shrink)

The present study provides evidence that valence focus and arousal focus are important processes in determining whether a dimensional or a discrete emotion model best captures how people label their affective states. Individuals high in valence focus and low in arousal focus fit a dimensional model better in that they reported more co-occurrences among like-valenced affective states, whereas those lower in valence focus and higher in arousal focus fit a discrete model better in that they reported fewer co-occurrences between like-valenced (...) affective states. Taken together, these findings suggest that one static, nomothetic theory may not accurately describe the subjective affective experience of all individuals. (shrink)

Over the last decade, personalized medicine has become a buzz word, which covers a broad spectrum of meanings and generates many different opinions. The purpose of this article is to achieve a better understanding of the reasons why personalized medicine gives rise to such conflicting opinions. We show that a major issue of personalized medicine is the gap existing between its claims and its reality. We then present and analyze different possible reasons for this gap. We propose an hypothesis inspired (...) by the Windelband’s distinction between nomothetic and idiographic methodology. We argue that the fuzzy situation of personalized medicine results from a mix between idiographic claims and nomothetic methodological procedures. Hence we suggest that the current quandary about personalized medicine cannot be solved without getting involved in a discussion about the complex epistemological and methodological status of medicine. To conclude, we show that the Gadamer’s view of medicine as a dialogical process can be fruitfully used and reveals that personalization is not a theoretical task, but a practical one, which takes place within the clinical encounter. (shrink)

Neuroscience was the basic science behind Freud's psychoanalytic theory and technique. He worked as a neurologist for 20 years before being aware that a new approach to understand complex diseases, namely the hysterias, was needed. Solms coined the term neuropsychoanalysis to affirm that neuroscience still belongs in psychoanalysis. The neuropsychoanalytic field has continued Freud's original ideas as stated in 1895. Developments in psychoanalysis that have been created or revised by the neuropsychoanalysis movement include pain/relatedness/opioids, drive, structural model, dreams, cathexis, and (...) dynamic unconscious. Neuroscience has contributed to the development of new psychoanalytic theory, such as Bazan's ( 2011 ) description of anxiety driven by unconscious intentions or “phantoms.” Results of adopting the “dual aspect monism” approach of idiographic psychoanalytic clinical observation combined with nomothetic investigation of related human phenomena include clarification and revision of theory, restoration of the scientific base of psychoanalysis, and improvement of clinical treatments. By imbricating psychoanalytic thinking with neuroscience, psychoanalysts are also positioned to make contributions to neuroscience research. Freud's original Project for a Scientific Psychology/Psychology for Neurologists can be carried forward in a way that moves psychoanalysis into the twenty-first century as a core contemporary science (Kandel, 1999 ). Neuroscience as the basic science of psychoanalysis both improves the field, and enhances its scientific and cultural status. (shrink)

Consumer complaining behavior (CCB) is an important stream of research and practice, as it links the domains of service failure and service recovery. CCB research, although extensive and temporally wide, exhibits a lack of concern for the underlying assumptions of scholarly inquiry. Researchers neither explicitly mention, nor consciously indicate their ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions. We systematically identify the extant CCB literature and map it to two well-accepted paradigmatic classifications (Burrell and Morgan 1979; Deetz Organization Science 7(2): 191–207, 1996). Normative (...) or functionalist paradigm with the assumptions of an objective external reality, a positivist epistemology, a determinist view of human nature, and nomothetic methodology emerges as the dominant CCB research paradigm. The implications of this dominance are discussed as a barometer of the future of CCB research and practice. (shrink)

Ecological psychology (EP) and the enactive approach (EA) may benefit from a more focused view of lived temporality and the underlying temporal multiscalar nature of human living. We propose multiscalar temporality (MT) as a framework that complements EP and EA, and moves beyond their current conceptualisation of timescales and inter-scale relationships in organism-environment dynamical systems. MT brings into focus the wide ranging and meshwork-like interdependencies at play in human living and the questions concerning how agents are intimately entangled in such (...) meshworks, utilising them as resources for skilful living. We develop a conceptual toolkit that highlights temporality: Firstly, we address lived temporality. We use a case study from psychotherapy to show how a person’s skilful engagement with the world is best described as adaptive harnessing of interdependencies of constraints residing across a wide range of timescales. We call this skill time-ranging. Secondly, the case study provides a proof of concept of the integration of an idiographic approach to human conversing and a more general theory of emergent organisation rooted in theoretical biology. We introduce the existing concept of constraint closure from theoretical biology and scale it up to human interactivity. The detailed conceptualisation of constraint interdependencies constitutes the backbone of the proposal. Thirdly, we present a heuristic mapping of what we call organising frames. The mapping guides the conceptualisation of the emergence of inter-scale relationships and serves as an epistemic tool that brings together nomothetic and idiographic approaches. Finally, we combine new ideas with re-interpretations of existing EP and EA concepts and elaborate on the need of a fresh new look at the implicit and sometimes missing conceptualisations of temporality in the EP and EA literature. (shrink)

Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) is a method for exploring inner experience. DES subjects carry a random beeper in natural environments; when the beep sounds, they capture their inner experience, jot down notes about it, and report it to an investigator in a subsequent expositional interview. DES is a fundamentally idiographic method, describing faithfully the pristine inner experiences of persons. Subsequently, DES can be used in a nomothetic way to describe the characteristics of groups of people who share some common (...) characteristic. This paper describes DES and compares it to Petitmengin’s [Phenomenol Cogn Sci, this issue] second-person interview method. (shrink)

Explains why the debate initiated by Stephen Lloyd Smith’s plea to jettison the so-called ‘Standard Account of Method’ ––the conventional wisdom of how research philosophy and methodology ought to be taught to management students––is of the utmost importance to the teaching of management studies in British universities. Identifies a fully-developed presentation of the SAM framework in a well-considered and widely-used textbook––‘Research Methods for Managers’ by John Gill and Phil Johnson––and demonstrates that the book’s argument is both logically and scholarly defective. (...) Identifies the SAM as a form of dogmatic rationalism; one that is oblivious to the possibility of applying deductive inference in the service of a critical rationalism. Outlines the logical role of deductive testing in empirical research and demonstrates that there need be no great divide between nomothetic and ideographic research problems once appropriate distinctions are drawn between different forms of explanation. Nonetheless, questions the relevance of these research problems to the concerns of practising managers by highlighting the contrast, as made by philosophers, between social science and social technology. Concludes that the continued presentation and defence of the SAM, as the conventional wisdom of how research philosophy and methodology ought to be taught to management students, is thoroughly lamentable. (shrink)

The belief in miracle, as a modality of spiritual/religious coping strategy in the face of stress and psychic suffering, has been discussed in psychological literature with regard to its positive or negative role on the health and well-being of patients and family members. In contemporary times, where pseudo-conflicts between religion and science should have been long overcome, there is still some tendency of interpreting belief in miracle – as the possibility of a cure granted by divine intervention, modifying the normal (...) course of events in a bleak medical diagnosis – as having unhealthy impacts in the care and treatment of health. This position seeks to find a base in the three characteristics of hoping in a miracle, frequently pointed out by psychological literature: it would imply a negation of reality instead of its confrontation; it would be a coping strategy focused on emotion instead of the problem; it would imply seeking to modify the supposed desire of God by extra-natural facts. In this study, we shall critically discuss this position and the dangers of its crystallization by the use of SRC scales in which the act of praying for a miracle is previously classified as a negative strategy. We revisit some tendencies in psychological literature about the subject, taking into consideration the various facets of miracle, sociocultural facts, elements of idiographic nature, and their profound outcomes in the lives of people especially in health contexts. We illustrate the dangers of a hasty generalization of the results of nomothetic studies about the role of belief in miracle with two examples of research in the Brazilian context: one carried out with pregnant women with fetal malformation and the other with family members caring for children and adolescents with cancer under chemotherapeutic treatment. In both studies, the results do not confirm the predominance of the negative aspects associated with the act of praying for a miracle, which we discuss and analyze in light of the phenomenological perspective. In this perspective, “pray for a miracle”, as experienced by patients and caregivers, can be recognized as an act of openness to life, bolstering hope, and the resignification of reality in the psyche. (shrink)

The present study provides evidence that valence focus and arousal focus are important processes in determining whether a dimensional or a discrete emotion model best captures how people label their affective states. Individuals high in valence focus and low in arousal focus fit a dimensional model better in that they reported more co-occurrences among like-valenced affective states, whereas those lower in valence focus and higher in arousal focus fit a discrete model better in that they reported fewer co-occurrences between like-valenced (...) affective states. Taken together, these findings suggest that one static, nomothetic theory may not accurately describe the subjective affective experience of all individuals. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the teleological perspective articulated by Émilie du Châtelet in her Institutions de physique (1740). I argue for the decisive influence of Christian Wolff on the metaphysical conception advanced by du Châtelet in the first chapters of this work aimed at providing a consistent metaphysical foundation to the new physics. I further claim that the principle of sufficient reason plays a crucial role in this endeavor. I then show that du Châtelet initiates a significant shift in teleology: she (...) moves away from the ‘idiographic’ standpoint focused on details and singularities, and advances a new, ‘nomothetic’ teleological perspective based on the regularity of the laws of nature. (shrink)

Existen dos corrientes de la filosofía analítica en la historiografía: el neopositivismo de Hempel y la filosofía analítica de la historia de Gardiner y Danto. Para el primero, el modelo de la historiografía debe ser similar al de todo conocimiento científico, a saber, el modelo nomotético de las ciencias físicas y naturales. Para Gardiner y Danto, en cambio, este modelo debe desprenderse del propósito particular de los historiadores y del lenguaje acorde a dichos propósitos. Sus conclusiones abrieron la posibilidad de (...) una nueva perspectiva de análisis, el texto historiográfico, lo que impulsó la reflexión hacia la filosofía del lenguaje y la hermenéutica. There are two historiographic prospects of analytical philosophy: Hempel’s neo-positivism and Gardiner and Danto’s analytical philosophy of history. According to Hempel, the model of historiography should be the same as all scientific knowledge, namely, the nomothetic model of the physical and natural sciences. According to Gardiner and Danto, however, this model must arise from the purpose of historians and language consistent with those purposes. Gardiner and Danto’s conclusions opened the possibility of a new analytical perspective, the historiographic text, prompting the debate toward the philosophy of language and hermeneutics. (shrink)

Both swaraj and swadeshi emerged in the context of nationalist discourses that set independence as a universal goal. This notion of independence derived its meaning from the empires that co-constituted modernity, and meant decolonization. Despite metaphors and other extensions, the little nationalisms within the Indian trans-nation have proved unable to postulate any sort of semi-sovereignty within the larger republic as a credible goal. This Bengal-focused study argues that sustainable autonomy cannot be promoted if all sub-nations are stampeded into ‘one size (...) fits all’. Any ethnic community must take exonyms like ‘Bong’ on board and learn how to elude ethnographic museumization, how to fashion an explicitly contested interdependence with other stakeholders in a game of history that must go on even after the old nationalisms have crumbled. This paper’s interpretive methodology affirms the idiographic level, resists multiplying nomothetic moves beyond necessity, and targets positivism. (shrink)

A co-authored collaboration between a theatre practitioner and a clinical psychiatrist, this paper will examine Rough for Theatre II and Beckett’s demonstration of the way records are used to understand the human subject. Using Beckett’s play to explore interdisciplinary issues of embodiment and diagnosis, the authors will present a dialogue that makes use of the ‘best sources’ in precisely the same manner as the play’s protagonists. One of those sources will be Beckett himself, as Heron will locate the play in (...) its theatrical context through reflections upon his own practice as well as recent studies such as Beckett, Technology and the Body and Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama ; another source will be the philosopher Wilhelm Windleband, whose 1901 History of Philosophy was read and noted upon by Beckett in the 1930s, as Broome will introduce a philosophical and psychiatric context to the exchange. Windelband is now a neglected figure in philosophy; but as one of the key figures of Neo-Kantianism in the late 19th century, his work was an important impetus to that of Rickert, Weber and Heidegger. Specifically, Windelband gives us the distinction between idiographic and nomothetic understanding of individuals, an approach that is of relevance to the psychiatric encounter. This academic dialogue will consider tensions between subjectivity and objectivity in clinical and performance practice, while examining Beckett’s analysis of the use of case notes and relating them back to Windelband’s ideas on the understanding of others. The dialogue took place in 2011 at the University of Warwick, and has since been edited by the authors. (shrink)

One of the most problematic aspects of the ‘Harvard School’ of liberal international theory is its failure to fulfil its own methodological ideals. Although Harvard School liberals subscribe to a nomothetic model of explanation, in practice they employ their theories as heuristic resources. Given this practice, we should expect them neither to develop candidate causal generalizations nor to be value-neutral: their explanatory insights are underpinned by value-laden choices about which questions to address and what concepts to employ. A key (...) question for liberal theorists, therefore, is how a theory may be simultaneously explanatory and value-oriented. The difficulties inherent in resolving this problem are manifested in Ikenberry's writing: whilst his work on constitutionalism in international politics partially fulfils the requirements of a more satisfactory liberal explanatory theory, his recent attempts to develop prescriptions for US foreign policy reproduce, in a new form, key failings of Harvard School realism. (shrink)

The modern research university is an unsustainable institution. It normalizes academic activity along the lines of a scientist engaged in normal science and seeks to measure the success or failure of academics based largely on the quantity of their contributions to a particular discipline, often measured in terms of papers published and conference presentations. The ensuing race to produce academic studies is creating unprecedented mountains of academic studies, but often in haphazard, unstructured, and unsustainable ways, especially in the humanities and (...) the social sciences, which do not discover nomothetic laws or accumulate knowledge in a fashion similar to science. This not only undermines the quality of work being done and the character of academics doing this work but also results in the thoughtless, endless, largely unstructured mountains of new studies that no one can keep up with. (shrink)

Children with complex communication needs (CCN) regularly have barriers to express and discuss emotions, and have fewer opportunities to participate in emotional conversations. The study explores and analyzes the changes after a training program focused on offering an interactive home learning environment that encouraged and modeled emotion-related conversations between a parent and a child with CCN within storybook-reading contexts. An observational design (nomothetic/follow-up/multidimensional) was used to explore and analyze the changes in the communicative interaction around emotions between mother-child. Augmentative (...) and alternative communication (AAC) technologies were used to provide the child access to emotion-related vocabulary. The training program resulted in the mother providing more opportunities to engage her child in emotional conversations, suggesting that when opportunities and resources to talk about emotions were promoted, the child showed more engagement in emotion-related conversations using his AAC system. The mother–child communicative patterns and behavioral relationships observed during the phases are also presented. This case study illustrates the importance of a primary communication partners’ role in facilitating emotional conversations, and the promising efficacy of a training program implemented in a storybook interactive learning environment to promote conversations about emotion-related events while encouraging children with CCN to learn, explore, express, and discuss emotions. (shrink)

In response to concerns about the subsuming of individuals under essential general psychiatric diagnostic categories, there have been calls for an idiographic component in person specific diagnostic formulations. The distinction between the idiographic and nomothetic was introduced by Windelband as his contribution to the Methodenstreit. However, as I have argued elsewhere, it is unclear what the distinction is supposed to comprise. In this chapter, I attempt to shed light on the motivation for the distinction by looking at a number (...) of recent approaches to healthcare that share a concern with a focus on individuals. Despite this shared element in their motivation, I argue that none help to articulate the nature of the idiographic itself. This chapter broadens the central claim of my chapter in the 2019 Yearbook of Idiographic Science, here drawing on a clue from Windelband’s student Rickert to argue that there is a role for the idiographic in healthcare though not as a form of judgement, understanding or intelligibility but rather a specific singular interest in an individual. It is this that also underpins developments in healthcare related to the individual or person. (shrink)

In response to the concern that criteriological psychiatric diagnosis, based on the DSM and ICD classifications, pigeon-holes patients, there have been calls for it to be augmented by an idiographic formulation [IDGA Workgroup, WPA 2003]. I have argued elsewhere that this is a mistake [Thornton 2008a, 2008b, 2010]. Looking back to its original proponent Wilhelm Windelband yields no clear account of the contrast between idiographic and nomothetic judgement. Abstracting from Jaspers’ account of understanding an idea of idiographic judgement based (...) on the contrast between singular and general causal relations also fails. I argue, however, that Windelband does provide a helpful clue in his remark that ‘every interest and judgement, every ascription of human value is based upon the singular and the unique... Our sense of values and all of our axiological sentiments are grounded in the uniqueness and incomparability of their object’ [Windelband 1980: 182]. This suggests a role for the idiographic not as the content of a particular kind of judgement but rather as characterising its aim. I argue that this connects to the issue of the generalisability of small scale qualitative social science research and to the critique of ‘looking away’ in moral philosophy. (shrink)