ABSTRACT
Since Aristotle and Bacon, a cardinal move in the European sciences has been ‘division’, the reduction of a problem to smaller, more manageable units for purposes of scientific scrutiny. Empiricism reflects this strategy in its commitment to the endless refinement of the universe of fact. Positivist-style analysis gives chase to an even larger, if less differentiated, body of data with the butterfly net of positivist laws. Both methods exemplify the doctrine of ‘divide and conquer’.
