incoherent in their approach, being divided between scientific and narrative
perspectives. With the exception of the more analytic strands of philosophy and
linguistics, the humanities have generally opted for a narrative perspective—as is
most obvious in history and literary theory. Economics and academic psychology like
to position themselves squarely into the scientific camp, driven in part by what has
been called “physics envy”, i.e. the desire for a fully mathematical, deterministic
theory based on precise laws of behavior. However, this desire has been largely
frustrated up to now, as human behavior appears much too complex to be reduced to
deterministic models. Sociology, psychiatry, philosophy and anthropology mix both
perspectives, depending on the problems addressed or the traditions within a
particular school of thought. For example, psychoanalytic approaches to
psychotherapy are almost exclusively narrative, while behavioristic ones aim to be
strictly scientific.
The difference between the two philosophies has perhaps been formulated
most sharply as a distinction between idiographic and nomothetic methodologies
[Cone, 1986]. Nomothetic investigation aims at the formulation of general laws that
describe the behavior of broad classes or populations of individuals. Idiographic
studies aim to describe the specific characteristics of a single individual. For example,
in management science, case studies are idiographic while the formulation of
organizational principles is nomothetic. Although a nomothetic theory may seem
preferable because it can be applied to an unlimited number of cases, proponents of
the idiographic approach argue that each case is unique, and therefore nomothetic
generalizations merely succeed in capturing superficial similarities between cases
while neglecting their rich individual essence. Perhaps the most compelling
idiographic approach for studying individual behavior is (auto)biography [De Waele
& Harre, 1979], i.e. a narrative reconstructing a particular person’s life story
[McAdams, 1999], as this may provide a unique insight into how or why that person
came to perform certain actions (e.g. commit a crime, or make a scientific discovery).
The present paper does not propose an answer to the difficult question of when
a nomothetic approach is preferable to an idiographic one, or vice versa. However, it
proposes a new conceptual framework that to some degree unifies the core ideas of
scientific and narrative perspectives. It achieves this by generalizing the idiographic
notion of a life story with the help of the nomothetic notion of an agent whose
behavior is governed by the principles of evolution, cybernetics and complex adaptive
systems. This will lead us to replace the Newtonian metaphor of “behavior as the
functioning of a clockwork mechanism” by the novel metaphor of “life as an
adventure”.