How Idiographic Science could Create its own Terminology

The image of Babel immediately evokes the image of a mishmash of idiosyncratic differences. Creating a utopian universe of 72 (or so¹) languages used in that world (instead of a united system) tells us about the human capacity to create mystiques. New sciences are no exception—the emerging idiographic science aims toward unified language use—but still has to live in the booming and buzzing confusion of terminologies inherited from its parent disciplines. Yet (at least in the scientific arena) the original ideas of the Tower of Babel are to be regarded as a constructive aim rather than a tragic condition into which we can fall. People sharing a common activity realize that they are immanently different from each other, yet united. Sharing a project is the source of and the condition for their recognition of what divides them. Dividing is a form of uniting rather than excluding. The human body includes myriad division lines—cell membranes and tissue borders—yet the joint function of such structural decisions is precisely to unify the systemic functioning of the whole organism. Whatever leads to the creation of divisions is more than only an “empty space” that becomes inhabited by absolute idiosyncracies. The very realization that we are unable to coordinate each other’s activities is already a collective product, entailing the shared idea of something to build together, namely, the Tower. What distances people is a bond—a separation that differentiates and at the same time connects: it differentiates for the sake of connecting and connects for the sake of differentiating.