  In making these points Oakeshott draws on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German thinking about the study of history, especially the anti-positivism of Windelband, Rickert, and Dilthey. Their arguments rest on a distinction between the realms of human freedom and natural necessity articulated by Vico, Kant, and Hegel, among others. Understanding human conduct in terms of thought and action can nevertheless be scientific—that is, systematic—in its own manner. Such an inquiry might focus on what Hegel called “objective spirit”, shared ideas expressed in languages, moral traditions, and other practices that require interpretation. But it might also focus on individual performances: particular acts, ideas, judgments, arguments, and other products of thinking. In either case, the disciplines of the humanities and humanistic social sciences are concerned with the content of thinking—ideas—not the natural processes that make thinking possible (VLL 23–24). This claim is at odds with how the social sciences are widely understood and especially with much in the disciplines of psychology and cognitive science. 