Definitions
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- adj. Pertaining to or expressing general laws that lack logical necessity.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Or or pertaining to nomology, in any of its meanings.
Etymologies
Examples
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The laws linking mind and brain are what Feigl (1958) calls nomological danglers, that is, brute facts added onto the body of integrated physical law.
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She explains their more or less general domain of application in terms of causal capacities and arrangements she calls nomological machines (Cartwright 1989; Cartwright 1999).
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This way, one might have interaction yet preserve a kind of nomological closure, in the sense that no laws are infringed.
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As these boundaries become nomological systems the "other" acquires a quality -- in psychological terms -- of being considered essentially unnatural.
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Alethic quirks: There are four levels of possibility we might distinguish: logical; metaphysical/nomological; temporal; technical.
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As these aesthetic boundaries build into nomological systems, these features are held to infringe the laws of normality, which in this case manifest as prescriptive standards of quality.
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In the "literary" camps of both SF and Fantasy, and in allied territories like slipstream and postmodernism, where experimentalist approaches are par for the course, we may well see logical impossibilities, outright self-contradictions, but for the most part the impossibilities we're dealing with are nomological.
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In fact, because we are dealing with the event as an explicable or inexplicable act within the text, rather than an affect of the text, focusing on it as a thing which either fits or does not fit our notion of nomological possibility, I would prefer to move from the abstraction of qualities to the concreteness of objects -- to talk of the artifice and the anomaly rather than the artificial and the anomalous.
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Metaphysics steps outside the domain of physics in order to build models of nomological substructure that might (theoretically) allow for apparent circumventions of material cause-and-effect.
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If the events portrayed in strange fiction "could have happened" or "could not have happened" according to our sense of nomological possibility, then there is also a degree to which, according to our sense of aesthetic and ethical necessity these events "should have happened" or "should not have happened".
houdini commented on the word nomological
From the Oxford English Dictionary Online:
Relating to, concerned with, or designating laws, esp. (Philos.) ones which are not logical necessities; relating to nomology. Occas. as n.: a nomological law.
July 30, 2008