Symptomatology: Nomothetic vs. Idiographic Explanations

from SpinbitZ I, p187

We will never find the sense of something….if we do not know the force which ... is expressed in it. A phenomenon is not an appearance or even an apparition but a sign, a symptom which finds its meaning in an existing force. The whole of philosophy is a symptomatology…

— Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy

An instance of these distinctions in action can be seen in the different forms of scientific explanation.  Nomothetic explanations are general case explanations using laws governing and derived from generalized categories, whereas idiographic explanations recognize the immanent  idiosyncrasies of the individual object or event and attempt to tell the story of that particular event/object.  An example of a nomothetic explanation would be the mechanical laws of physics, such as F = MA, whereas an example of an idiographic explanation would be the explanation of a medical case file culled from an exhaustive examination of the patients history of symptoms; a symptomatology.

It may indeed be the case, given the transcendent bias, that the nomothetic explanation exclusively is imposed on the immanent world of the quantum because we expect things to get ultimately and categorically simple in our post-medieval and foundationalist scientific mind-set.  Without recognizing the infinite difference of immanence (Leibnizian/Prigoginian active-space/matter), we can’t see deviations from these categories and laws for what they are; emergent properties from immanent complexity.  And so we assume that conceptual randomness, opposing our simplified categories, rules in this domain, rather than recognizing the limits of the nomothetic explanation and the need for the idiographic. 

This is a classic example of the transcendent-bias in action.  Given the Principle of Infinite Determinism, above, the resolution to the conundrum is simple.  Embrace the immanence of univocity and there is no need to discard the idea of causation or determinism when our categories and laws give way to the idiosyncrasies of the individual object-event.  The call for randomness, in every case, can be seen as the conflict and break-down of the nomothetic categories in the entropic face of infinite difference and idiosyncrasy.  Randomness, then, calls for the idiographic methodology, in a univocal polarity of explanatory function between the nomothetic use of the principle of the same and the idiographic use of the principle of infinite difference. 

Indeed, the laws were formed as general cases from a symptomatology in the first place.  In our foundationalist mind-set we simply expected them to govern absolutized categories, with absolutized laws, rather than real idio-singularities of infinite difference in interactions of infinite detail.

The Univocity Framework, therefore, opens the way beyond the closed oppositional forces of the categories of Representation, to a recognition of the need for an evolutionary history—a symptomatology—for each individual “particle,” in order to get a full account of the infinite determinism equals indeterminism of any single event-object, and indeed to account for the “arrow of time,” in the eternal NOW.  No two events are alike or ultimately predictable, not because there are no determining factors involved (i.e. randomness), but because there are infinitely many.