Concept information
Preferred term
nomothetic
Definition
- 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. [Source: Encyclopedia of Geography; Nomothetic]
Broader concept
Belongs to group
URI
https://concepts.sagepub.com/social-science/concept/nomothetic
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