The Logic of History.—If it were possible to formulate laws of history according to the nomothetic paradigm, it would not follow that a logic of history had been established. Laws must be formulated in a context, within a received conceptual framework, in which the concepts employed in the laws have some prior definition, if only implicitly through their use. The logic of history is not that any nomothetic principles posited to predict the course of events do in fact predict the next steps in history, but rather this logic would provide the theoretical basis of any proposed nomothetic principles. (If preferred, this could be called the philosophical logic of history, rather than logic simpliciter, but it is, in any case, prior to the promulgation of laws.) Laws framed in terms of concepts unelucidated or presupposed would be laws without foundation. The laws themselves are derivative of an anterior logic, so that to leap ahead to any predictive principles such as Popper denied in denying that there could be any theoretical science of history is to put the cart before the horse. First we must put in the hard work of a fine-grained parsing of every concept we employ, knowingly or not, and for those concepts employed unknowingly, there must be the additional step of rescuing from obscurity the concealed presuppositions that have been the basis of our explanation and understanding of history. Until that work is done, laws of history will be nothing more than anecdotal, and are rightly to be viewed with skepticism, if not to be dismissed outright with derision.   

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.

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Martin Allard in his Medium article: The Elements of Social Science