Nomothetic

Beginning with Fred Schaefer's famous attack on what he called “exceptionalism” in 1953, the central claim of the idiographic approach that history and geography are concerned only 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 as to whether geography should be involved in general laws of understanding (i.e., the relative emphasis on regional differences vs. regional similarities, the factors that differentiated places vs. the commonalities that ran through them). Thus, the shift from an idiographic geography to a nomothetic one 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, 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 have long been associated with the attempt to make the discipline more “scientific” in the same sense as the physical sciences. Thus, advocates of the nomothetic approach 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, [Page 340]and predictive ability. These tools are held to uncover the logical structures that underpin the play of empirical surface appearances. All of 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 Ockham's scalpel, that is, choosing the simplest approach. Methodologically, nomothetic approaches were closely associated with the rise of statistics and mathematical models that were central to the rise of spatial analysis and location theory. Epistemologically, nomothetic views relied on a Kantian view of absolute space rather than on later relativist notions of space as socially constructed.

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