ABSTRACT
A recurring theme throughout much of the scientific study of behavior has been the contrast between the nomothetic and idiographic approaches. Although Allport (1946) and other 20th century psychologists are often cited among the first psychologists to emphasize this distinction, there is evidence that the distinction itself can be traced back as far as Aristotle. For example, Nagel (1961, pp. 547-548) cited Aristotle as the source of the distinction between nomothetic sciences, “which seek to establish abstract general laws for indefinitely repeatable events and processes; and the ideographic, which aims to understand the unique and nonrecurrent.” The terms themselves are attributed (van Lieshout, 2000) to the German philosopher Windelband (1910) who first referred to the distinction between ideographic and nomothetic scientific approaches in 1894.
