Foundations of Critical Criminology – Week 5 Lecture
What is the Sociology of Knowledge?
1. It is the study of how ideas, beliefs, and processes for verifying knowledge are generated by groups. (Simply not any old set of ideas, some opinions and ideas carry more weight as they have a hierarchy of credibility)
2. Inherent in the production of knowledge is conflict over who controls what and whom. (Those who control production of knowledge, favour one group who control the means of production, working class do not, the state control the means of production of knowledge)
3. Explains how theory is put together overtime under specific conditions, (Ex. Marx could have existed in the Paleolithic age).
4. The production of knowledge and the imposition of ideas throughout the social order is political, therefore ideological. Hence John Hepburns comment that “political society is built upon a foundation of repressive force.” (KNOWLEDGE IS POLITICAL)
What makes Canada a community? It’s politically constituted by force and by law, making Canada what it is. A group made Canada into a nation-state through their controlling means founded by colonial ruling class
We will need to situate knowledge within social relations, a product of social relations and social relations as the product of knowledge (KNOWLEDGE DOES NOT EXIST OUT OF SOCIAL RELATIONS). In other words through knowledge is human consciousness of reality constructed and reality experienced through knowledge. “The problem of generating and protecting knowledge is a problem in politics and problems of knowledge are inherently problems of social order.”
Knowledge is not only about experience, an articulating experience, and sharing experience from one group of people to another across time and space. Most of the things you learned, you learned from someone else…from THEIR experience (according to the hierarchy of credibility) get to comply and believe that they’re members of on social group vs. another.
Must define: Knowledge, Theory & Science (no such thing as classical criminology, various schools of thought)
Without clear definitions of the building blocks of knowledge about reality, we will take for granted the claims that criminologists make about the construction of moral phenomena as being objectively real.
Human experience of reality is instead negotiated, politically and socially constructed
If the state cannot be bound by it’s own definition of crime, then criminology is known as a SERVANT of the state
What is Knowledge?
Technical Definition: DATA will be defined as input gathered through the senses and INFORMATION as integrated data, which denotes a significant change in the environment. Information is converted to KNOWLEDGE by interconnecting it with known concepts and skills as part of achieving a goal. WISDOM is knowledge about knowledge.
Since “data”, “input” and “information” MUST themselves be filtered through some social procedure to be recognized as data input and information. Is this sort of definition not already self-limiting an ideological?
Knowledge is the construction of categories that enable us to ORGANIZE and TEST reality, both natural and social. The purpose of knowledge is to:
Give MEANING to the human experience within the ordered-disordered facts of nature and social interaction. (Nature speaks but only we can interpret and give meaning to the voice because in our absence, nature still exists)
Establish PREDICTABILITY by:
Recognizing patterns in nature or the natural order.
Imposing social order to produce predictable social regularity.
Utilizing nature’s patterns to produce and manage social order and to use social order to manage nature.
With and through knowledge, we seek to CONTROL:
Our experience with ourselves.
Situations in order to produce favorable outcomes. (Ex. Power).
Others and whole social formations.
To CONTROL is to PREDICT and where prediction does not conform to expectation, then coercion to bring ‘order’ to reality is the result.
To PREDICT is to CONTROL.
CONTROL is always a negotiation, since nature is active and human beings are not passive recipients of order produced by coercion.
As a fact of human existence, knowledge is in every case, A SOCIAL ENTERPRISE (In order to have knowledge you have to have social relationships). As a social enterprise, there are rules for:
Producing knowledge.
Validating what counts as knowledge.
Consuming knowledge.
Knowledge is not simply produced by individuals. It is produced by:
Individuals in relationship with other individuals.
Those other individuals cooperate in ways that are either coerced or voluntary.
As a social enterprise, knowledge exists in a feedback loop with how human beings organize themselves in groups to produce and reproduce themselves. So, the scale and scope of social organization imposes qualitative differences on knowledge.
This means that to survive a tribe of 10 people produces and relates to knowledge very differently from a nation of 10 million people.
You can imagine the cooperative basis for 10 people. Generating knowledge is more voluntary than coerced, where for 10 million, it is the reverse.
You can also imagine that in a community of 10 people, the philosophical basis for knowledge is based on observations of nature and persons in the community and of other tribes that are in distinguishable: people are nature, nature are people.
Animism, where human beings see themselves in nature and nature, speaks around the world.
But in a social order of 10 million, knowledge is divided into two branches, science, and social science, and each has sub specializations.
WE MUST BE MINDFUL:
Of the logical fallacy that ‘order’ is ‘normal’ rather than disorder and unpredictability.
That order is spontaneously self-generating from and in a dialectical relationship with chaos.
The presumption that there are conditions of ‘disorganization’ and ‘pathology’, and that there are persons and groups that are objectively abnormal, deviant, criminal, pathological, and so on have no objective reality.
That human knowledge is fallible, not absolute. In all instances there are things we and purposely led to believe that are wrong and that there are things we cannot know possibly ever.
What is Theory?
It is an explanation or model of an observed fact based on general principles, so-called laws or propositions that account for a phenomenon.
Some explanations and models are verifiable through experimental procedure and after repetition if the results are consistent, the theory is agreed upon by the consensus of expert explainers that is valid.
Thomas Kuhn argues:
Where a theory becomes the accepted explanation, this is called a PARADIGM.
Since science is ongoing in each paradigm is an anomaly waiting to become the next paradigm.
Explanations can be based on:
Inductive Reasoning: which is building a general theory from a singular instance, often based on experimentation where the research causes something to happen.
General Specific
Deductive Reasoning: which is using generalizations to formulate a hypothesis which may then be tested empirically.
General Specific
Abductive Reasoning/Inferential Reasoning: which is formulating a theory from incomplete data. and evidence.
Theories cannot be proven or disproven. They have lesser or greater explanatory power in terms of being commensurate with known events.
What, theoretically, is “society”?
“Socius” – Latin for “companion” 2 uses:
Concrete: Which signifies a group of individuals with a mutual commonality, goal, object, or end.
Abstract: Which is a conceptual tool for a large or small collective of persons whose relationship is held together by a coherent belief system or ideology. Their relationship is maintained by coercive authority in which relations are managed by ‘bureaucracy’ and ‘institutions’.
What makes Canada a society? (Law, Economy, Political Organization) All about controlling the state
Society does not exist as a thing, rather it is relationships bound by authority, mutual dependence (both voluntary and coercive) and power.
There is no master concept or basic unity of society. It may seem an odd position for a sociologist to adopt, but if I could, I would abolish the concept of society altogether. (M. Mann)
Man is referring to the state form of existence in and through which small group of elites supported by the monopoly on force:
Control ideological production.
Own and or control economic means of production.
Coercion by control of military and police force.
Dominate the political means for legitimacy.
The few at the top can keep the masses at the bottom compliant, provided their control is institutionalized in the laws and the norms of the social in which both operate. (Mann)
What is Sociology?
“Socio- “ology”: which refers to the study of society.
Auguste Comte “Social Physics” aka Positive Sociology “Sociology” was intended as the empirical study of to positively enable the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
Economic Life
Ruling ideas
The individual
Family structure
division of labour.
Language
Religion.
Sociology is a scientific discipline that studies human behavior. It rests on a body of interrelated scientific positions or generalizations that explains social behavior. Sociologists also seek to predict and provide empirical verification for human behavior.
2 problems with this definition:
Scientism. Uses the rhetoric of science but cannot reproduce its practice.
Reification Presumes society causes behaviour. Instead, human behavior is influenced by accommodation or resistance to:
Specific economic and political patterns of relationships determined by authority.
Ideas
Beliefs
Desires
“GEMEINSCHAFT’ (community) societies a high degree of consensus about what is ‘normal’ ordering according to the natural and social world. (ppl knew each other)
Minimal degrees of labour categories and specialization:
Communal production.
No, labour and social alienation.
Human production of knowledge is not mediated by:
Bureaucracy.
Experts
Communications media.
“GESELLSCHAFT” (society) societies, consensus is a product of politics (hegemony balance between, force of persuasion, an persuasion of force.)
High degrees of labour categories and specialization.
Social bonds are determined by law. (Social contract.)
Conflicting over values about social order and distribution of means of production and goods and services.
High labour and social alienation.
Knowledge is hardly ever firsthand, but is externally generated by:
The state and social institutions, (formal and informal).
Communications media.
Spontaneous philosophy. (Language, religion, folklore.)
In Gesellschaft social formations, where values differ and there is significant political agitation to:
Reform
Ensure values are in line with practice.
One purpose of the production of knowledge is to affirm the legitimacy of categorizations order versus disorder sanctioned by powerful institutions. Therefore:
Knowledge Claims. (Ex. Political Differences)
Knowledge procedures to arrive at truth.
Become sites at which politics is played out before a resort to force. (Repression and revolution.)
IMPORTANT: keep referring to ‘Hierarchy of Credibility’
What is Science?
Science is the application of inductive experimental practice.
Deductive hypothesis based on experimental practice or measurable observations. (Ex. Einstein’s theory of general relativity when he conceived it.)
No science is without quantification or measurement. (Ex. Hence why mathematics is not a science. But mathematics is essential to the procedures of science.)
The scientific method:
Evidence: the measurement from experimental procedure.
Cause: The most robust theories explain the totality of an event than parts of it.
Falsification: Efforts to invalidate a theory by way of an experiment and detailed observations.
Correspondence: A new theory cannot deny a previously validated one.
Consistency: A theory must follow the rules of logic in which theory is expressed.
Simplicity: The simplest explanation is generally the most persuasive.
A single principle or law that accounts for a multitude of variables is the most valid.
Criminology
It is scientific inquiry into the causes of crime and its deterrence.
Lawbreaking. (Roots of…)
Lawmaking (Process of…)
Social reaction. (Types of…)
Criminology the systematic study of crime and criminals began in the last half of the 19th century. Criminologists offered a variety of explanations for the nature of crime, why people commit crime and what should be done.
There are 2 basic approaches to the study of crime:
Behavioural.
Presumably based on scientific Inductive Reasoning:
Particular instances, hypothesis-controlled environment, proof by falsification.
But are really thought experiments whose hypothesis can never be verified by the scientific method.
Deterministic:
1.) Biological, 2.) psychological. 3.) Social-cultural, and 4.) combination of 1-3
Crime is seen as ontologically real = Objective, measurable.
It is a function of either operant conditioning (learning through socialization) in the social context. (Ex. Poverty)
The social context is a function of traits specific to groups and individuals. (Age = teens, Poverty as different from middle class wealthy | cultural, ethnicity, race different from the norm.
Definitional
To the extent criminal law is normatively biased against groups marked by stigma, disfavor, and social distance because they are relationally and psychosocially subordinate, the process by which they become objects of social derision demonization and the object of moral entrepreneurialism is the focus of the definitional of theories of crime.
Examples of definitional theory
Are based on conflict perspectives.
Assume a pluralistic orientation to rules and power. (Ex. Symbolic interactionism)
like critical criminology. Explore class colonialism, imperialism, race, sex in the unequal creation, an enforcement of law.
Alternative and oppositional viewpoints are:
Abolitionism, + anarchism, + social harms = Anti-criminology.
Anti-criminology refuses ALL behavioral theories.
Of definition of theories, but as power as a core principle to establish social values as the basis for research inquiry.
Mentions idea that will come back on TAKE HOME EXAM: the idea that we see drug dealers are bad, but physicians are essentially drug dealers (Ch. 3 and 4)
Determinism
Whether behavioral or definitional, all criminological theory assumes deterministic causation for crime.
Determinism is the assumption that there is regularity in nature.
Human beings, depending on what are considered relevant and variables, also have predetermined behavioral modes.
Human determinism can be a single-factored or a combination of factors that include:
Biological/genetic
Cultural
Psychological
Social
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