Nomotic approach

Nomotetics , nomotetic approach or method (from other Greek. Νόμος - law + root θη- - to believe, establish) - 1) in Kant’s teachings, a way of “legislative” activity of the mind in establishing laws and rules of cognition ^[1] ; 2) in the neo-Kantianism of the Baden school , the method of the natural sciences, aimed at identifying general laws that generalize the general trends of science. The concept was introduced by Wilhelm Windelband , described in detail by Heinrich Rickert , who, after Kant, saw the subject of natural science in nature as the being of things, because it is defined by general laws. The nomotetic method is opposed to the idiographic method, aimed at revealing its uniqueness in the studied object (the latter, according to Rickert, should be used by sciences that study individual, special phenomena, such as, for example, history ).

In the XX century, a whole series of literary theories appeared that applied the nomothetic approach, realizing the principle of philology as an exact science. These theories include structuralism (see the article by Yu. M. Lotman “Literary criticism should be a science” ^[2] ), the Opoyaz and neopoyaz formalism (for example, Boris Yarkho ), as well as the nomotetic tradition of modern American philology ^[3] .