Every month some one pronounces that science must be rejected if we are to preserve a belief in human freedom, or that only by a faith in freedom that flies in the face of logic and the principle of causality can democracy be justified. Equally often other authors insist that the increase of knowledge in the science of human behavior makes plain the irrelevance and sentimentality of pious talk about free and rational choice. What is the source of this dispute? Why is no resolution of it arrived at?

It is by now a commonplace that the classification of sciences into nomological and ideographical, which originated with Windelband, is neither exhaustive nor exclusive. Rather, there are sciences in which nomothetical (law establishing) activities are prevalent and there are sciences in which ideographical (describing peculiarities) efforts dominate. A third kind of enterprise is widespread throughout most, if not all, sciences: typological undertakings. In some sciences these are the most important and dominant projects. Linguistics tries to establish types of expressions: phonemes, morphemes, syntactical categories. History of art endeavors to set up various styles, i. e., types of art. General history attempts at well founding of such notions as revolution, reaction, buonapartism, findesieclism. When a historian declares that a revolution starts when a housewife cannot buy a chicken on the market, he divides the stream of events into periods according to a criterion that seems to him important, establishes similarities between different periods, and classifies them into types. Such typological activities are common not only in social sciences and humanities but also in physics which speaks about explosions, collisions, changes from a positive to a negative acceleration. A mathematician often enters into a typological venture, e.g., when he analyzes a function as increasing in an interval or describes it as concave upward in another interval. Typology may be conceived as containing the theory of classification. But there are typological problems that are not included in the theory of classification. A classification is performed on a class when its subclasses are defined. Typology, as suggested by the examples, may take a single object and try to conceive it as a summation of its fragments. To find a segmentation suitable from some point of view is not a classification. Rather, classification presupposes segmentation.

1. Argument. Questions that have arisen about the “existence” of elementary particles and other entities of physics have often been dismissed as unprofitable, with the tacit assumption that the categories suitable for the discussion of everyday knowledge are not suitable for the discussion of physical knowledge, which requires mathematical treatment. But for the layman who stumbles at the discontinuity between his world and that of mathematical physics, and for the physicist who wishes his knowledge of the world to have some kind of unity, a scheme which will embrace both kinds of knowledge is essential. Such a scheme is developed from a consideration of the dependence on mind, and conceptual modes of thought, common to science and all other intellectual approaches to the world, which is seen clearly in the growth of science from more primitive concepts. It begins with the concept as the most elementary category of the organization of experience, and moves to the construct, a distinctly scientific category arising out of the concept, and the isolate, corresponding to elements of reality not directly perceived. An escape from certain paradoxes generated by the incomplete nature of perceptual experience is thus provided.

This paper is inter-disciplinary. Its disadvantage is that the author is not sufficiently conversant with the disciplines it is inter. He may however, like Lord Wavell, claim that at least the thread that binds them is his own.

The paper is of philosophic interest in that it is inspired by, and hopes to shed some light on, the notion of an ideal language. It is of interest to social anthropology in that its main subject is kinship structure. It may be of interest to mathematicians in setting a task.

One example which Peirce chose to illustrate his pragmatic maxim as thus stated was the familiar theological distinction between transubstantiation and consubstantiation. Now (Peirce says) since these two doctrines agree in all of the effects which they conceive the sacrament to possess and which may have practical bearings, here and hereafter, it is absurd to say that there is any real distinction between the two doctrines. Peirce declares in the same passage that, having used the question as a logical example only, he does not care to pause to anticipate the theologian's reply.

In order to understand man's different and often contradictory ideologies we need to explore their deeper roots, analyzing ideas. We do not comprehend the nature of ideas and yet we use and oppose them, realizing that they are wonderful and dangerous entities whose action is comparable to that of drugs. They depress or stimulate the organism, leading men toward great deeds or toward individual and collective disaster. Ideas interfere with the autonomic mechanisms of the body, and are also projected into the social world, creating machines, institutions, methods and goals. Notwithstanding, we usually pay little attention to this tool, creator of all other tools and root of human activity. Assuredly a theory of the idea and of ideologies cannot be developed without the convergent effort of scientists and philosophers, but we can glimpse the possibility of its construction, conscious nevertheless, of our shortcomings and of the provisional character of the presented synthesis.