ABSTRACT
According to Aristotle, poetry, like theoretical science, is “more philosophic and of graver import” than history, for the former is concerned with the pervasive and universal, and the latter is addressed to the special and the singular. Aristotle’s remark is a possible historical source of a widely held current distinction between two allegedly different types of sciences: the nomothetic, which seek to establish abstract general laws for indefinitely repeatable processes; and the ideographic, which aim to understand the unique and nonrecurrent. It is often maintained that the natural sciences are nomothetic, whereas history (in the sense of an account of events) is ideographic; and it is claimed in consequence that the logic and conceptual structure of historical explanations are fundamentally different from those of the natural sciences. It is my aim here to examine this and related issues in the logic of historical analysis.
From Scientific Monthly, 54 (March, 1952): 162–169. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and the author. Ernest Nagel is Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University.
