ABSTRACT
The role of identifications undercuts the supposed difference between “idiographic” and “nomothetic” sciences. Such laws play a part in the grouping of a variety of givens in such a way that they are all appearances “of” one and the same individual, and in providing the boundaries that set different individuals off from one another. Temporal laws are sometimes contrasted with what are called “simultaneity laws”, like statements of causal connections; or better, with “atemporal laws”, like those in which one magnitude is stated to be a determinate function of certain other magnitudes. Interval laws are those which state a relation between events separated by a distinct time interval. They are called “diachronic” as opposed to “synchronic” laws. Genetic laws are temporal laws stated, not in terms of some fixed time interval, but in terms of the “age” of the event: its distance in time from an appropriate zero-point. Pattern laws are genetic laws referred to some zero point in time.
