When a new branch of science reaches a state where its growing knowledge can be systematically investigated,celebration of an important milestone of development is in order. This first Yearbook of Idiographic Science is such milestone. Since the beginning of the International Journal of Idiographic Science in 2005, the work that has reached the public audience has constantly been growing. This is no surprise since studying our phenomena of interest in their uniqueness of singularity—yet with goals of generalization makes perfect sense for both science and for practice.
To set the stage for this Yearbook, we identify key issues on which further advancement of the idiographic science depends. Each issue is a knot of various conceptual tensions whose clear definition lays the foundation for a scientific program. Here we will deal with three main issues. Each of them entails very general questions for any science:
• What does depicting sense-making mean and how does it work? Sense is idiographic by its nature—yet science operates with generalizations. Our goal is to show that such opposition is an artifact—there is always generality in the particulars and from the specific single cases we can arrive at generalizations that do not require the use of the notion of sample or population. The generic notion of a triangle is present in each and every triangular shape in the world—and to retrieve it we do not need to know what the “population of triangles” is like (nor do we need a “sample” of triangular forms to arrive at a triangle)
• As soon as one acknowledges the co-constructive circularity between sense-making and the sense-maker-- what is the conceptual status of the individual and which basic theoretical goals one can assume as fundamental anchoring in the production of knowledge about subject-system transaction?
• What does development mean? What are the aims-- and the syntax—in our efforts to understand it? This question has been a stumbling block for developmental psychology over the past 150 or so years—and its general solution is still nowhere in sight. Science that fails to chart out its basic coordinates fails in its knowledge construction task. All these issues are crucial for the advancement of idiographic science,as it suffers from the outset from the stigma of social representation coming from the term idiographic. We do not see any reason for such stigma—as we are addressing the basic science issue of generalization—yet the social perceptions of our efforts need not concur.