Wilhelm Windelband and the Place of History among the Sciences
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Saturday 11 May 2024 is the 176th anniversary of the birth of Wilhelm Windelband (11 May 1848–22 October 1915), who was born in Potsdam on this date in 1848.
One way to understand Windelband’s contribution to the philosophy of history is to position his work in relation to the old question of whether history is an art or a science. Those who say that history is an art point out that history is expressed in a prose narrative, and that history, like poetry and drama, has not surpassed its ancient models. Thucydides marks a high point in history as Aeschylus marks a high point of tragedy.
Those who say that history is a science can cite the research and the evidence that history requires and that art does not. While the humanities today may have fallen away from a condition of previous excellence, when the curriculum for the humanities was as difficult and as rigorous as that of the sciences, but in a different way, there remains the possibility of the humanities as a rigorous discipline. A student in the humanities was once expected to master Greek and Latin, and, if his research took him into ancient history where Greek and Latin were no help, then he might also have to master ancient Assyrian or Aramaic, as well as the auxiliary sciences of history, like sigillography and vexillology, and so on. Among those who argue that history is a science, Leopold von Ranke is most frequently cited as the man who made history scientific, though Ranke’s methods of text criticism arguably extend back in time at least to the renaissance, when Lorenza Valla proved that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery. In any case, the study of language unified the humanities much as mathematics unifies the natural sciences.
Wilhelm Windelband was among those who argued that history is a science, but if you argue that history is a science, the next step is to say what kind of science it is, because it doesn’t seem to be a science like physics or mathematics. This is where Windelband made his lasting contribution. Windelband argued that history is a science, but that it is a peculiar kind of science.
Windelband was among the first to make a principled distinction between the physical sciences and the social sciences, or, if you prefer, between the natural sciences and the humanities. Windelband’s principled distinction within the sciences is his distinction between the idiographic and the nomothetic. As far as my knowledge extends, this distinction was given its first exposition in Windelband’s 1894 rectorial address as Strasbourg. Here is how he formulated it at that time:
“In their quest for knowledge of reality, the empirical sciences either seek the general in the form of the law of nature or the particular in the form of the historically defined structure. On the one hand, they are concerned with the form which invariably remains constant. On the other hand, they are concerned with the unique, immanently defined content of the real event. The former disciplines are nomological sciences. The latter disciplines are sciences of process or sciences of the event. The nomological sciences are concerned with what is invariably the case. The sciences of process are concerned with what was once the case. If I may be permitted to introduce some new technical terms, scientific thought is nomothetic in the former case and idiographic in the latter case. Should we retain the customary expressions, then it can be said that the dichotomy at stake here concerns the distinction between the natural and the historical disciplines.” (Wilhelm Windelband, Rectorial Address, 1894)
In brief, the nomothetic is the lawlike and the universal, while the idiographic is individual and the particularistic. A distinct methodology is required for the exposition of the nomothetic and the idiographic, but the fact that each branch of science does have a methodology for the exposition of their chosen object of knowledge demonstrates that they are both sciences, though different kinds of sciences. Near the end of his rectorial address, Windelband says that, despite the distinction he has formulated, the ultimate aim of scientific knowledge is its ultimate unity:
“…in the total synthesis of knowledge, which is the ultimate aim of all scientific research, these two cognitive moments remain independent and juxtaposed. The general nomological regularity of things defines the space of our cosmic scheme; it transcends all change and expresses the eternal essence of reality. Within this framework, we find the vital development of the structure of all the individual forms which have value for the collective memory of humanity.”
The idea that nomological regularity defines the space of our cosmic scheme suggests that the nomological is the ultimate basis of science and scientific knowledge, and the idiographic must find a place for itself within the interstices of this nomological scheme; there are several other passages in his rectorial address that also suggest this. But Windelband also says that the nomothetic and the idiographic remain independent and juxtaposed, and he concludes this talk with an interesting juxtaposition:
“A description of the present state of the universe follows from the general laws of nature only if the immediately preceding state of the universe is presupposed. But this state presupposes the state that immediately precedes it, and so on. Such a description of a particular, determinate state of the arrangement of atoms, however, can never be derived from the general laws of motion alone. The definitive characteristics of a single point in time can never be immediately derived from any ‘cosmic formula.’ The derivation of the description of a single temporal point always requires the additional description of the previously existing state which is subordinated to the law. General laws do not establish an ultimate state from which the specific conditions of the causal chain could ultimately be derived. It follows that all subsumption under general laws is useless in the analysis of the ultimate causes or grounds of the single, temporally given phenomenon. Therefore, in all the data of historical and individual experience a residuum of incomprehensible, brute fact remains, an inexpressible and indefinable phenomenon.”
Given this juxtaposition, we could also characterize the nomothetic and the idiographic as the distinction between general laws and brute fact. Natural science is the science of general laws; history is the science of brute fact. Each requires the other: general laws must work upon brute fact, and brute fact is made comprehensible by its subsumption under general laws. Formulated in this way, it makes sense that the science of general laws would require a distinct method from that of a science of brute fact.
Now I want to return to the problem with which I started: is history an art or a science? Windelband, as we have seen, says that history is a science, but it is a peculiar kind of science with its own methodology, and that methodology is idiographic. This claim doesn’t go down well among many philosophers of science. Among philosophers, especially since the advent of Newtonian science, physics has been taken to be the paradigm of a natural science. Physics is also often called a “hard” science, and mathematics a “pure” science, but what makes a science hard or soft, or pure or impure, is a problem that only philosophy can attempt to address. Physics is also clearly nomological, and physicists are justly proud of their precise statement of the laws of nature in a mathematical formalism.
Many of those who would make history a science want to assimilate history to the natural sciences, and they assume that there is, or there ought to be, a methodological unity across all the sciences. In other words, there are no kinds of science, there are no distinct classifications of science each with their own methodology. Science is one, and not many. For Windelband, science is many, not one, and it must remain many because of the juxtaposition of general laws and brute fact.
Can we call this for either side? Has the past century and a quarter of scientific discovery and philosophy of science given us a way to decide between the claims that science is one and science is many? In a word, no. I will go further and make a more radical claim: my response to this is that no sciences are scientific. Before you call me a nihilist, let me try to explain.
The individual special sciences, like physics or biology, are scientific to some degree, but all fall short of converging on complete scientificity. I have often pointed out, though not in any of these Today in Philosophy of History episodes, that there is no science of science. Individual sciences are pursued scientifically, but we have no general method for the foundation of a new science and no general method for the expansion and progress of an existing science. Intuition still plays a crucial and substantive role in the development of science. The progress of science, then, is idiosyncratic, subject to the intuitive perspicacity of its practitioners.
Our understanding of science is pre-paradigmatic, to use a Kuhnian term, even if particular sciences are fully paradigmatic. It seems paradoxical that the individual sciences can be as well defined as any part of human knowledge, while the whole enterprise of science remains essentially unknown to us. If we could christen this paradox with a memorable name maybe the realization of not knowing what we are doing when we do science would get some traction and some theoretical attention.
Whether or not this is a paradox, it shouldn’t surprise us, since it’s baked into the very substance of science. Science progresses when it manages to hit upon a productive set of abstractions that we can use to leverage a very narrow way of looking at the world. When I say that about “managing to hit upon the right abstractions” this is key here, because, given the lack of a science of science, there is no method of converging upon optimally productive abstractions; we can only cast about for them.
Finding productive abstractions is idiosyncratic: some individuals have a much better feel for converging on productive abstractions than others. This idiosyncratic efficacy is a function of science remaining an art rather than being a science — that is to say, science itself is an art to some degree. To give a sense of really how “out to sea” we are when it comes to scientific knowledge, consider this: In the absence of a rigorous science of science, it would be nice at least to have a proof that a rigorous science of science is possible, or that it is impossible — one way or the other — but we don’t even have this much.
Now, it seems clear to me that some sciences are more science and less art, while other sciences are more art and less science. It also seems clear to me that physics is more science, and history is more art, but they both occupy points on the art-science continuum, and in this sense, if no other, all scientific thought is unified in not being perfectly or exhaustively scientific.
One of the first steps we might take in formulating a science of science would be a taxonomy of the sciences. Windelband seems to do this by giving us a fundamental distinction that exhaustively divides all sciences between the nomothetic and the idiographic. Windelband’s distinction, if strictly observed, cleaves science in two, with the natural sciences on one side of the division, and the historical sciences (or, if you prefer, the humanities) on the other side. But he didn’t always insist on his distinction as being an exhaustive classification, and he gave a different sense to his distinction in a little book titled Theories in Logic in English. This was originally written in German as “Die Prinzipien der Logik” and appeared in the Enzyklopadie der Philosophischen Wissenschaften, 1912, but the English translation was published as a short book.
In Theories in Logic Windelband suggests that sciences might be more or less nomothetic, more or less idiographic, and the nomothetic or idiographic proportion of a science may change over time:
“…we have to distinguish between those sciences which are governed by laws and those which deal with events, between nomothetic and ideographic inquiry. It is this which really makes the difference in intellectual interest between Natural Science and the Humanities. But we cannot repeat too often that we are here only speaking of ultimate aims and hence of those sciences which appear as polar opposites, between which the real work of Science moves in manifold gradations, so that in any particular case we can only speak of a preponderance of one or the other moment — as Rickert, in his penetrating analysis of this relation, has pointed out. The ultimate goal of all investigation of Nature is to attain timeless generic concepts of being and happening, but that does not exclude the fact that the way thereto leads over stages of simpler interconnexions in which it rests and provisionally halts. For it is precisely in the real that the nomothetic rationalisation of Reality must find its limits. On the other hand, the specific object of all historical inquiry is a construction which is significant chiefly because it can never recur, and which has to be lifted out of its entanglement in the non-significant elements lying all around it. To understand such a construction, however, History requires general concepts and axioms, which she is certainly more likely to borrow successfully from general experience than from the natural sciences… and it creates for itself the possibility of characterizing this unique object by a peculiar kind of generic concept and by a comparative study of the conformity of events to law.” (p. 57)
Windelband’s original distinction implies that natural science and the humanities are polar opposites in terms of their methodology, but in fact the development of science involves “manifold gradations” in which the nomothetic and the idiographic preponderate by turns. This means that natural science (and the humanities as well) might swing like a pendulum between a nomothetic pole and an idiographic pole, being now more nomothetic, and now more idiographic. I think Windelband was right about this, but if the whole of science can tend toward the nomothetic or the idiographic, then his distinction isn’t the kind of beginning of a taxonomy of sciences that we would want to pursue if we wanted to formulate a science of science.
If you think about it, it’s remarkable that so much thought and effort has been poured into the sciences and into philosophy of science, and yet we don’t have any kind of workable classification of the sciences other than a university catalog and the arrangement of books in the library by subject matter. If we were to take a page out of Carnap, we would start with classificatory concepts of science, that is to say, a taxonomy, and then we work our way to comparative concepts, and eventually converge on fully quantitative concepts. We could argue that physics has a greater number of quantitative concepts than history, therefore on this Carnapian basis physics is closer to converging on scientific status than history, and I wouldn’t disagree with this. It’s a lot like my earlier claim that physics seems to be more science and history more art, though both are on the same art-science continuum.
Carnap’s schema of scientific concepts has been widely influential and widely criticized. For my part, the longer I have thought about this, the more I have come to see that an optimal taxonomy is one of the last things that a science arrives at, and, if I am right about this, then a science of science that could render both physics and history fully, completely, and exhaustively scientific would arrive last of all at a satisfying taxonomy of the science. Given this desideratum, it might well be premature to seek a taxonomy, but, on the other hand, there is a big difference between a workable taxonomy and an optimal taxonomy. The development of a science often passes through a sequence of taxonomies that become more adequate as they are repeatedly revised.
I would expect the same to be true of a science of science, so I would expect to see a rough, workable taxonomy of the sciences followed by revisions that would render it more adequate over time. Does Windelband’s distinction between the nomothetic and idiographic sciences give us this rough, working taxonomy that could be the basis of further elaboration? Maybe yes; maybe no. If Windelband is to be the basis of a science of science that can comprehend both physics and history and everything in between, it would need to be set in a much more comprehensive theoretical framework, and this has not yet been done.
