Nomothetic

Beginning with Schaeffer's (1953) famous attack on what he called exceptionalism, the claim central of the idiographic approach that history and geography are only concerned with the unique aspects of individual places, the discipline began a transition into a nomothetic body of knowledge, one that sought general laws of explanation independent of time and space. Whereas idiographic understanding sought to uncover all the aspects of one place, nomothetic understanding sought to reveal how one phenomenon varied among many places.

The idiographic-nomothetic debate, also known as the systematic versus regional geography debate, raged throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. This clash of views essentially involved the question whether geography should be involved in general laws of understanding, that is, the relative emphasis on regional differences versus regional similarities, the factors that differentiated places or the commonalities that ran through them. Thus, the shift from an idiographic to nomothetic geography was closely (but not exclusively) associated with the broader decline in the regional approach. This move involved the triumph of the abstract over the concrete, the general over the particular, [Page 2035]and the universal over the specific. Nomothetic approaches valued abstraction and empirical regularities and held that the empirical world existed solely for the purpose of testing theory.

Rejecting the empiricism of the idiographic approach, nomothetic forms of geography are long associated with the attempt to make the discipline more “scientific” in the same sense as the physical sciences. Advocates of the nomothetic approach thus exhibited a disdain for induction and a sustained concern for the role of theory and explanation. This view centered on a sharp fact-value distinction, rigorous methods of data collection and sampling, deductive (also called nomological) logic, hypothesis testing, quantitative methods, reproducible results, and predictive ability. These tools are held to uncover the logical structures that underpin the play of empirical surface appearances. All these were hallmarks of the philosophy of logical positivism. In this account, the process of explanation involves embedding the unique within the general, that is, showing an individual set of observations to be the outcome of wider principles at work in a variety of places. A law is held to be a hypothesis that is repeatedly confirmed under controlled conditions. Choosing among competing laws involves invoking the principle of Occam's razor, that is, choosing the simplest approach whenever possible. Methodologically, nomothetic approaches were closely associated with the rise of statistics and mathematical models, which were central to the rise of spatial analysis and location theory. Epistemologically, nomothetic views relied on a Kantian view of absolute space rather than later relativist notions of space as socially constructed.

Critics argued that this approach effectively reduced geography to geometry, ignoring historical context, social relations, or the role of human consciousness. Moreover, not all regional details could be so easily swept under the carpet of general theory, as the revived localities school maintained.