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Popper’s New Chopper

Popper’s New Chopper. Positivism, Postmodernism and the Quest for Objectivity in Criminology Ben Heylen Department of Criminal Law and Criminology Research Group on Criminology and the Sociology of Law Ghent University. Research Group on Criminology and the Sociology of Law.

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Popper’s New Chopper

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  1. Popper’s New Chopper Positivism, Postmodernism and the Quest for Objectivity in Criminology Ben Heylen Department of Criminal Law and Criminology Research Group on Criminology and the Sociology of Law Ghent University Annual Conference of the European Society forCriminology 08-11 september 2010, Liège, Belgium

  2. Research Group on Criminology and the Sociology of Law The only course open to the social sciences is to forget the verbalfireworks and to tackle the practical problems of our time with the helpof the theoretical methods which are fundamentally the same in allsciences. I mean the methods of trial and error, of inventing hypotheses which can be practically tested, and of submitting them to practical tests.-Popper ([1945] 1962, vol. 2, 222) Ben Heylen: “Popper’s New Chopper”. ESC Conference 09/09/2010

  3. Research Group on Criminology and the Sociology of Law Introduction • Stratified ontology and social scientific practice • Misconcpetions about objectivity and their pitfalls • Situational analysis and its critics • Structural components of a theory • A Reply to Popper’s Critics • Conclusion • Postscript: Popper for the social sciences: the long road ahead Ben Heylen: “Popper’s New Chopper”. ESC Conference 09/09/2010

  4. Ben Heylen: “Popper’s New Chopper”. ESC Conference 09/09/2010 Research Group on Criminology and the Sociology of Law I. Stratified ontology

  5. Research Group on Criminology and the Sociology of Law I. Social scientific practice Ben Heylen: “Popper’s New Chopper”. ESC Conference 09/09/2010

  6. Research Group on Criminology and the Sociology of Law II. Absence of world three: pitfalls Ben Heylen: “Popper’s New Chopper”. ESC Conference 09/09/2010

  7. Research Group on Criminology and the Sociology of Law Some final considerations • Statistics can not be considered to be a safeguard against this “new problem of induction” • Indications in practice: overspecialisation/diversification (theory v applications) • Remedy: deductive, theory-driven research • Need for epistemology, meta-theoretical rules tailored to the social sciences Ben Heylen: “Popper’s New Chopper”. ESC Conference 09/09/2010

  8. Research Group on Criminology and the Sociology of Law An afterthought If scientific objectivity were founded, as the sociologistic theory of knowledge naïvely assumes, upon the individual scientist’s impartiality or objectivity, then we should have to say goodbye to it. (…) for there is no doubt that we are all suffering under our own system of prejudices (…) and scientists are no exception to this rule (…). For by making their minds more ‘objective’ they could not possibly attain to what we call ‘scientific objectivity’. No, what we usually mean by this term rests on different grounds. It is a matter of scientific method. (1945: 217) . Ben Heylen: “Popper’s New Chopper”. ESC Conference 09/09/2010

  9. Thank you for your attention • Further questions: ben.heylen@ugent.be

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