Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- adj. Of or relating to lawmaking; legislative.
- adj. Based on a system of law.
- adj. Of or relating to the philosophy of law.
- adj. Of or relating to the study or discovery of general scientific laws.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- adj. defining laws
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- adj. Legislative; enacting laws.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Legislative; enacting laws.
- Pertaining to a nomothete, or to the body of nomothetes.
- Founded on a system of law or by a lawgiver; nomistic: as, nomothetic religions.
- Noting a science which aims at the discovery of universals or general laws: opposed to idiographic.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adj. relating to or involving the search for abstract universal principles
Etymologies
Examples
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First, there is a critique of the "nomothetic" quest -- the idea that the social sciences should discover social laws.
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I believe the distinction by Wilhelm Dilthey between "nomothetic" (= positing laws) and "idiographic" (= describing individuals) sciences, is still much more fruitful than other approaches that tend to blur the dividing line.
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On the one hand, Wilson has thus strengthened the Soviet element within "post-Soviet transitions" lending support to those researchers emphasizing the continued relevance of the ideographic element in †"as opposed to nomothetic approaches to â€" the study of contemporary Russia, Ukraine, etc.
Understanding the Orange Revolution: Ukraine's Democratization in the Russian Mirror
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Unlike the “nomothetic” knowledge that natural science seeks, what matters in historical science is not a universal law-like causality, but an understanding of the particular way in which an individual ascribes values to certain events and institutions or takes a position towards the general cultural values of his/her time under a unique, never-to-be-repeated constellation of historical circumstances.
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Most of the studies presented in this book are nomothetic.
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The nomothetic approach tries to draw inferences from a more limited exposure to a large number of cases.
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Qualitative research may be idiographic or nomothetic.
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Thus Windelband proposed that the natural sciences are nomothetic and the historical or cultural sciences ideographic.
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Dilthey rejects Windelband's distinction by showing that many natural sciences have ideographic elements and many human sciences such as linguistics and economics have nomothetic aims.
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It's also worth stating that one of the theoretical approaches associated with ethnographic research is an idiographic, rather than nomothetic, approach to data -- a concern with the particular, rather than the general.
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