Question

Explain briefly: Idiographic versus Namothetic interpretations

Quality versus Quantity in Phenomena

Deterministic versus Stochastic Descriptions

Answer 1

1.

Nomothetic and idiographic are terms used by Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Windelband to describe two distinct approaches to knowledge, each one corresponding to a different intellectual tendency, and each one corresponding to a different branch of academe.

• Nomothetic is based on what Kant described as a tendency to generalize, and is typical for the natural sciences. It describes the effort to derive laws that explain types or categories of objective phenomena, in general.
• Idiographic is based on what Kant described as a tendency to specify, and is typical for the humanities. It describes the effort to understand the meaning of contingent, unique, and often cultural or subjective phenomena.

2. The concepts of quality and property. In his practical activity and search for knowledge man selects from the multiplicity of surrounding phenomena "something" on which he concentrates. Philosophers call this an object. It may be a thing, a phenomenon, an event, a mental condition, a thought, a feeling, an intention and so on. An object can be singled out from the background of reality because it, as a fragment of existence, is delimited from everything else. Its limits may be spatial, temporal, quantitative or qualitative. If, for example, we are confronted with a plot of land of, say 20 sq m, these are quantitative limits. But this plot may also be a meadow as opposed to a forest, and this is its qualitative limit. Quality determines the kind of existence of an object.

Quantity. Every group of homogeneous objects is a set. If it is finite it can be counted. We may have, for example, a herd of 100 cows. To be able to consider each cow as "one", we must ignore all the qualitative peculiarities of these animals and see them as something homogeneous. One and the same number "100" is the quantitative characteristic of any set of 100 objects—cows, sheep, diamonds or whatever. Consequently, any quantity is a set if it can be counted, or a dimension if it can be measured.

3. In deterministic models, the output of the model is fully determined by the parameter values and the initial conditions initial conditions. Stochastic models possess some inherent randomness. The same set of parameter values and initial conditions will lead to an ensemble of different outputs.