ABSTRACT
Peter Winch, in his book The Idea of a Social Science1 discusses the nature of social regularity in terms of the rules for deciding the equivalency of events. Since regularity is understood as the recurrence of similar events its analysis is thought to be a problem of identity judgment. This problem is to be met with the provision of some rule with which to specify the criteria of such a judgment. Only one rule is to be associable with an equivalency. The rule, it seems, is particular to an inquiry and so judgments of identity are to be made with respect to that one rule prevailing over some specific inquiry. It may be that this ‘one rule’ provision arises from the notion that a given set of conditions holds for the determination of the validity of some measure, experimental result, or decision about the appropriateness of some data. For whatever reason, the one rule thus refers to the existence of a formulation of a given set of conditions and not to the situated work of doing an inquiry.
