#idiographic

Two Pathways to Scientific Rigor.—Schopenhauer’s historical categoricity presents the possibility of a way to nomoethetic rigor in history distinct from the nomothetic rigor of the natural sciences, attained through formal concepts rather than general concepts, but can we also define ideographic rigor for history? Although Windelband’s distinction between the nomothetic and the ideographic has been with us for well over a century, comparatively little effort has gone into clarifying ideographic methodology or into elaborating and extending ideographic methods so that they can stand as a viable alternative to nomothetic methods. There have been exceptions, like Heinrich Rickert, but nothing that we could call a scientific research program has appeared to advance the ideographic paradigm. Windelband himself tempered the distinction, arguing that sciences shift back and forth between nomothetic and ideographic methods as they pass through stages of development that tend toward the one or the other, implying that there are no pure species of the genus. Because the distinction has languished, there has been little or no effort contrariwise to more clearly define nomothetic methodology in contradistinction to ideographic methodology. If ideographic methodologies are to define an entire class of the sciences, demarcating them from the nomothetic sciences, the ideographic method itself would have to be developed in much greater detail. While there is little agreement within philosophy of science as regards what exactly constitutes rigorous nomothetic methodology, there is at least an attempt to capture and extend the methods of the natural sciences, which has been fruitful in its internal disagreement. This effort would be even more fruitful if it was consciously differentiating itself from ideographic methodology.

Historical Modes of Thought.—What is or what would constitute a distinctive mode of historical thought? Some would say it was Ranke who formalized historical method and professionalized the discipline, but much of Ranke’s method was already implicitly present in early modern histories, as with Étienne Pasquier, discussed by Paul Veyne in Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? Critical textual studies date all the way back to Lorenzo Valla, who proved the Donation of Constantine to be a forgery in the early fifteenth century. The formalization of text criticism is a means to an end, and the end is the reconstruction of past time from evidence available in the present. In other words, the historical mode of thought is the reconstruction of synchronic evidence as diachronic sequence. Collingwood’s a priori historical imagination is a method of reconstruction in the light of ellipses in the historical record. Danto’s analysis of narrative sentences is the weighting of an event in reconstructed time in relation to another event in reconstructed time, the better to produce a diachronic sequence. Varve chronology and dendrochronoloy are reconstructions of past time facilitated by advances in technology and scientific technique—advances that continue in the form of nuclear dating techniques and DNA sequencing. Again, this begins early with the laws of superposition in Nicolas Steno; the use of advanced technologies tend to overshadow the fact that these are new tools in the old quest to reconstruct the past. Perhaps the most distinctive of methods of historical reconstruction is seriation. Here the historians (or the archaeologists) can claim originality. It could be argued that all historical reconstruction is a form of seriation, because we do not find the events of history in serial order, but must render them in a series, and this is the work of reconstruction—transposing the simultaneous order of the present into the serial order of the past. It is here that we should seek after ideographic rigor.   

Rigor without Revolution.—Because historians, and the histories that they wrote, were passed over by the scientific revolution, there was no inflection point in history that distinguished pre-modern history from modern history, and while the methods of historians gradually and incrementally became more rigorous, there was never a time when the tradition was discontinuous from one generation to the next. The argument could be made that there was a greater transformation in the writing of history in the passage from the ancient to the medieval world than in the passage from the medieval to the modern world. If we are interested in a counterfactual for the intellectual life of Western civilization had its linear development never been preempted by the scientific revolution and then the industrial revolution, we can look to the development of historical thought, which has experienced no revolutions. Instead, history has ever so slowly built on its past, but never enough to introduce a discontinuity into the tradition, and still today we prize histories for the literary qualities, keeping alive the problem of whether history is a science or an art. The possibility of nomothetic rigor denied history for its failure to enter into the spirit of the scientific revolution has left it with the elusive possibility of ideographic rigor. If we view the history of history through this lens, we can trace a wavering line of increasing ideographic rigor from the inception of history in Herodotus to the present day, with two steps forward always followed by one step back. Historians were on their own, without the help of either logicians (whose rigor gave us the formal sciences) or mathematicians (whose rigor informed the natural sciences) in their pursuit of independent canons of ideographic rigor.   

Transcendental Formalism.—The aspiration for history to be a science constituted in naïve positivity has been the will-o’-the-wisp that has distracted some historians from the possibility of a shared foundation of historical knowledge that would be the foundation for any knowledge whatsoever. Dilthey, Windelband, and Rickert postulated a distinct method for history, still capable of scientific rigor, but not the method of the empirical sciences, and not the rigor of the empirical sciences. This is another distraction. Both are attempts to grasp from the outside that which is known for what it is only from within—even more so in the case of idiographic particularity as compared to nomothetic regularity. The mathematical formalisms expressing the inner truth of physical bodies come closer to fundamental reality than the contingent details that differentiate historical individuals. Husserl noted, “…what is a mutual externality from the point of view of naïve positivity or objectivity is, when seen from the inside, an intentional mutual internality.” (Crisis, section 71) Approaching the problem from a specifically historical perspective, Collingwood understood an aspect of this, holding that historical events must be known from their inside, but his conception of internality fell short of a foundation that could mutually constitute disjoint bodies of knowledge. What is required is an internality that transcends subjectivity, and in attaining this transcendence there is the possibility of a formalism that transcends objectivity. A formalism to express historical events would capture their distinctiveness better than the most painstaking exterior description, but converging upon mutuality internality—an internality sufficiently fundamental that it equally underlies disciplines as diverse as the empirical and social sciences—lies beyond (or below) the internality that is the complement of objectivity.

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Per realizzare la teoria diviene fondamentale una riforma radicale del linguaggio quotidiano. Frege quindi si inventa un nuovo linguaggio che viene chiamato idiografia. A partire dall’idiografia di Frege che si comincia a parlare di linguaggio Formale. Purtroppo l’idiografia inizialmente non è stata colta in modo positivo dai suoi contemporanei, come spesso succede con idee così innovative, ma Frege persiste nella sua teoria perchè convinto che sia possibile costruire un Linguaggio Logico che vada a fondare la Matematica e che possa rispondere a tutte quelle domande relative alla possibilità di quantificare il predicato.