ALL RED FEATHER MATERIALS ARE ALWAYS FREE TO STUDENTS AND TO THOSE WHO TEACH THEM....T R Young

VOLUME 8
Postmodern Criminology

 Re-Mapping American Criminology

Ellen C. Leichtman

January 7, 2000

Let me say, up front, that the word "statistics" in the title of this paper serves as a metaphor for the scientific method. The scientific method is based on the assumption that the universe is constructed mathematically and is "known" epistemologically. Thus, when a person uses statistics, s/he is circumscribing the way the world will be approached. This limitation forces a certain type of thinking which, in turn, invalidates questions that are not addressable within this method.

This paper addresses the fact that mainstream criminal justice either does not accept or does not know of the findings of major philosophical schools of thought since the turn of this last century that dispute the claims of epistemology. Thus, this paper begins with a description of some of the ideas of the founder of philosophical phenomenology, Edmund Husserl. It was Husserl’s contribution to disprove the notion that science is foundational. The second section of the paper contends that the scientific method is not the only method based on mathematical logic. Mainstream criminal justice does not seem cognizant of this. Thus, this paper discusses a different, and equally mathematically logical world construction, that used by structuralism, a model used extensively in the 1960s-1980s in fields such as literary criticism, anthropology and ethnomusicology.

The third section focuses on the some of the problems faced by scientists, both social and natural, in their quest for "objectivity" and "truth" within the scientific method. It also addresses criminal justice's conception of ethnography as a frill. This is contrasted with its use within the social science fields of anthropology and ethnomusicology. The fourth section, in a sense loops back to phenomenology, as it outlines Goffman’s frame analysis. Here the question becomes, not what is "objective" and "true" but what is "real." In criminal justice, only those things that can be measured are real or "knowable." Goffman disputes this. Finally, the paper concludes with a section on "explanation" vs. "understanding." Here we come back to just what is science, and how and why scientists "do" it. It is the contention of this paper, (taking its cue from Einstein, Kuhn and Holton, among others) that the major scientific breakthroughs are/were not scientific. While science has its place, as does statistics, it is not as the model for "knowledge."

Views espousing philosophies different from those of science have been marginalized within criminal justice (Arrigo 1999:10). This is not to say they are non-existent; they are just not easily accessible. Within the critical approach, feminist understandings (e.g., skimming the surface, Adler 1975: Pollock 1999; Rafter 1985; Howe 1994; Belknap 1996; Chesney-Lind 1997; Daley 1994; Gelsthorpe and Morris 1990; Gilligan 1990; Mann 1993; Messerschmidt 1993; and Naffine 1987) are the most apparent, although they are mostly relegated to courses dealing specifically with feminism and criminal justice. Other critical approaches are more difficult to find. Many male entries are among the lost. Critical criminologists (such as postmodernists, semioticians, and peacemakers--see, for example, Arrigo 1999; Barak 1994; Ferrell and Hamm 1998; Henry and Milovanovic 1996; Young and Arrigo 1997; DeKeseredy and Schwartz 1996; and Pepinsky 1991) are regularly ignored or disdained.

One reason is that faculties often teach what they believe and feel comfortable with. Exposing students to appoaches they consider to be non-rigorous does not fit the considered scholarly criteria of what should constitute the reading substance of an undergraduate or graduate course. Thus, it becomes the professors themselves who are the gatekeepers to the literature to which students are exposed. The nature of knowledge within the social sciences, and thus within mainstream criminal justice, has, for the most part, been treated as an epistemological problem. It is part of the general philosophical discussion concerning the relationship between the natural sciences and the social sciences. The epistemological problem of the social sciences has been how to accord it equal validity with the natural sciences (Madison 1988:40).While this discussion has often focused on how to reconcile explanation and understanding, in criminal justice it has taken the form of negating the validity of studies that do not conform primarily to the assumptions of the scientific method, with its emphasis on data collection and statistics.

Epistemology as a theory of knowledge is itself not a science, but rather a theory of science, which grounds the different sciences in legitimacy. It is the idea that philosophy is the foundational discipline of culture, that it will identify and solve philosophic problems once and for all, and that it will apply a systematic methodology to accomplish this (Bernstein 1983:6; Madison 1988:40).

For philosopher Richard Rorty, the understanding of a "theory of knowledge" derives from the seventeenth century and especially Locke; the notion of "the mind" as a separate entity, comes from the same period and especially Descartes; and the notion of philosophy as pure knowledge that can pass judgment on the rest of culture, can be traced to philosophers of the eighteenth century, and especially Kant. What was of primary concern, he says, was to keep philosophy rigorous and scientific (Rorty 1980:2-3). These notions have been embraced by the field of criminal justice. For both Rorty and philosopher Gary Madison, however, epistemology, as a major expression of the spirit of modern (as opposed to post-modern) philosophy, has outlived its usefulness (Rorty 1980:210; Madison 1988:40).

Since the time of Edmund Husserl, who lived at the turn of the last century, the epistemological approach has been under fire. This is not to say that a tradition contrary to that of Platonic rationalism has not been in evidence since the ancient Greeks. It has been alive in the work of such thinkers as Nietzsche and William James. But it was Husserl who, while believing in rigor and science, became convinced that the "objective" truths of mathematics and logic needed to be grounded in experience (Husserl 1970:23-59; Kearney 1986:13). It had not been his intention, or even his desire, to undermine modern philosophy and the epistemological tradition. Rather it had been his original wish to restore philosophy to its status as a foundational science in the Platonic and Cartesian senses. It was his concern to keep philosophy "scientific."

To Husserl, and to "modern" philosophers generally, the concept of knowing was the ability to represent what is outside the mind in an accurate fashion. To understand the nature of knowledge meant understanding the way in which the mind works in its construction of such representations (Rorty 1980:3-4; Madison 1988:40). Because it was not his intention to undermine the "scientific" nature of knowledge, but only the positivistic solution to it in order to achieve this goal, I am using Husserl’s arguments in this paper as a bridge between the current positivistic state of explanation in criminal justice today and a more radical understanding of the world by many current-day philosophers. I am using the word "radical" in the sense of the rejection of Cartesianism and metaphysics.

The task Husserl set for himself at the end of his life, in his major work The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, which was unfinished at the time of his death in 1938, was to discover the absolute foundation upon which all the individual sciences rested. While it is the culmination of his life’s work, it also incorporated two innovative features: 1) an incorporation of historical understanding into a philosophical analysis of the present; and 2) the inclusion of the concept of the life-world or Lebenswelt (Husserl 1970:xxx).

Husserl became convinced that the objective truths of mathematics and logic were actually rooted in what he called the Lebenswelt, or world as we actually live it. He called this grounding of truth in experience "phenomenology." Through it he wanted to return to the origins of knowledge by examining how the world first appears to human consciousness. It was his idea that the world is an experience which we first live before it becomes an object which we impersonally and objectively know. For Husserl, the primary point of contact between wo/men and the world is the experiential interface where the subject and object are primordially related, a state that occurs before the conventional experienced separation into polar subject and object. Relation, according to Husserl, is not something that occurs between two distinct substances as if they formerly existed independently. Rather, these substances are foremost in relation. It is only later that we separate them into individual entities. This Lebenswelt, or life-world, is prescientific, a flow of unreflective life, and is the foundation of all our constructs of the world, including that of the natural sciences. The scientific, objective world, he concluded, is but one way of viewing the world, one interpretation that serves its own purposes (Husserl 1970:48-70; Madison 1988:44; Kearney 1986:13).

Husserl’s phenomenology rejected philosophical arguments that sought to overcome the subject/object (mind/body) dualism of Cartesianism. He believed that only through the rapport between consciousness and the world could we find evidence of our lived experiences. He did not believe that the model of the natural sciences could be applied to the understanding of the human consciousness because it only credits as real that which is physically given and thus denies the life of consciousness. This means that the phenomena of consciousness are deprived of their essential status as living intentional experiences (Kearney 1986:16).

Historically, Husserl argues that through Galileo’s mathematization of nature, nature became idealized. We are now so used to shifting between theory and empirical inquiry that we tend to talk about geometric space and shapes as if they were the same as similar elements from experiential actuality. The "real" shapes of things, however, are never geometrically "pure." We discuss them, nonetheless, within the realm of the "pure," that is as shapes that are more or less straight, circular, flat, etc. Thus, we press toward the never attainable poles of invariant perfection. Through a method of idealization and construction, these models are applied to ever new aspects of the world (Husserl 1970:23-26). Thus we have:

Husserl criticized the positive sciences for taking the "objective" status of reality for granted and failing to put its own "subjective" presuppositions into question. Positivism doesn’t analyze what Husserl calls the "ultimate foundation" of our knowledge, the pre-reflective experience, as this type of experience eludes all fixed positivistic categories. By not analyzing this, positivism reduces the intentional acts of consciousness to purely empirical, quantifiable data. Thus, Husserl accused positivists of forgetting that what they consider to be neutral facts are really no more than abstractions that have been divorced from their origins in the life-experience (Kearney 1986:18).

The problem that Husserl’s conclusion leads to is that philosophy cannot make itself into a real, genuine and rigorous science. This is not a conclusion that Husserl himself wanted to accept. However, it is what his successors, including Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur, drew from his work. If we agree with Husserl that philosophy is not a science, as phenomenologists, existentialists, and postmodernists do, then scientific theorizing is not a complete reduction of the world. Instead, science becomes a particular kind of theorizing and interpreting upon a prescientific life-experience, and objective "truths" can be understood as interpretations (Madison 1988:44-45).

The uses of mathematical logic and scientific methodology are not only found in quantitative studies, however, they are also found in the linguistic model of structuralism. Here, instead of a focus on statistical quantification, the mathematical concepts highlighted are from modern algebra and include: "domain," "field," "group," and "isomorphism."

Structuralism was prevalent in France beginning in the 1960s and has been transported to other fields (I should say "domains") such as literary criticism, anthropology and ethnomusicology, under the assumption that these disciplines are, within themselves, communication systems and therefore comparable to language. Anthropologist Levi-Strauss was instrumental in translating this method to anthropology. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur summarized the presuppositions of this model as follows:

1) structuralism assumes that language is an object that can be investigated scientifically;

2) structuralism differentiates between a science of states of the system (synchronic) and a science of change (diachronic), and subordinates the latter to the former;

3) structuralism assumes that within the synchronic system there are no absolute terms but only relations of mutual dependence, so that language becomes a system of signs based on oppositions;

4) structuralism treats linguistic signs as a closed, autonomous system, in other words as a "domain," of internal dependencies (Ricœur 1981:8-9; Saussure 1983:16-17, 81, 120-122).

Saussure focuses on 3 concepts: langue, parole and langage. Because the English terms for langage and parole both translate to the word "speech" it is necessary to differentiate by using the French words. Langue (language) is a part of langage, which is all human speech. Husserl's understanding of the life-experience can be compared to Saussure's conception of langage. In the sense that the Lebenswelt (life-experience) encompasses the entirety of human existence, it can be considered congruent with Saussure's concept of langage (speech), which encompasses all human speech. Langue is the social product of all speech (langage), a collection of necessary conventions adopted by a society, which allows individuals to communicate through speech (parole). Parole is the individual’s activity of speaking. When Saussure separates language (langue) from speaking (parole), he is separating what is social from what is individual. This separation, according to Saussure, allows for the scientific study of language (Saussure 1983:9-14).

Structural analyses such as those done by Lévi-Strauss on the domain of myths, look for constituent units that imply the presence of such language structures as phonemes, morphemes and semantemes, but which are of a higher, more complex order. Lévi-Strauss calls them mythemes. These units are not isolated relations, but rather " bundles of such relations" that can be used and combined to produce meaning. By equating the domain of myth to language (langue), each variant can be considered individually, and thus within the realm of particular speech (parole). This means that there is no one "true" version of a particular myth. Thus, Lévi-Strauss places the genus of myth in the category of intermediary between langue, which he compares to a statistical aggregate, and parole, which would be the particular version of a myth. According to him, previous studies to explain variances assumed that myths were based on particular foundational stories, and that variants were the result of qualitative differences between the "primitive" mind and scientific thought. Lévi-Strauss’ work underscores the understanding that it is not the difference in the quality of thought that is at issue, but rather the nature of the ideas to which it is applied (Lévi-Strauss 1967:206-207, 212-213, 226-227).

A structural analysis is an explanation, not a way to understand or interpret. Narrative is considered within the domain of text defined by the postulates of structuralism. The analysis segments the work and then integrates the various levels of complexity of the parts to the whole. Analyses similar to the ones done by Lévi-Strauss on the domain of myth were done by V. I. Propp, and the Russian formalists (among whose most widely known proponents were Boris Eichenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomasjevsky and Juri Tynyanov) on the domain of folklore (Ricœur 1981:155-156; Hawkes 1977:59-73)

Approaching the social sciences through the laws of "objective realities and truths" have increasingly come under fire. Proposing the idea of "objective truth" as interpretation sheds a different light on the problem of validity. As Bernstein points out, however, it is not only the social sciences that have to be re-examined, it is also the natural sciences, this time under a hermeneutical dimension (or, as he puts it, its hermeneutical dimension has been "recovered") (Bernstein 1983:30).

Traditional philosophy, or the epistemology of science, is concerned with the idea of objectivity. The hermeneutics of science, however, is a reflexive inquiry that is concerned with our understanding of the world, and with all the ways that understanding manifests itself. These ways are, for the most part, essentially linguistical, as language forms our thought patterns. For example, the West uses the language of science in scientific writing because that language bounds its acceptable thoughts. Madison says that science is a particular, not a universal, language game (Madison 1988:45). This may seem counter to the very definition of science, which prides itself of its "universality." However, science is not universal in the sense that it discards those aspects of the world that are not universal, those aspects that are particular. In the process of discarding, science limits its understanding and thus becomes non-universal.

In his argument, Bernstein draws on the work of Mary Hesse’s Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science. Hesse first contrasts some of the differences that have historically been drawn between the social and natural sciences: First, while scientific data is defined as objective, testable or independent of theory, the data in the human sciences is recognized as determined as part of a theoretical interpretation. Therefore, "facts" must necessarily be interpreted within that construction. Second, the language of science is formal, exact and literal, meanings are univocal, and problems of meaning only arise in the application of universal categories to particular situations. The language of the human sciences, however, is irreducibly equivocal and continually adapts to particulars. Third, meanings in science are assumed to be separable from facts. This is not true for the human sciences, as what constitutes a fact is often man-made, like a documents, inscriptions, social rules or the like (Bernstein 1983:31-32).

While these differences have always been considered the major stumbling blocks to the social sciences ever becoming true science, the historical contrasts are not always what they appear. Lately, in fact, the same points made about the human sciences are being addressed to the natural sciences. That is, natural science data is now considered not detachable from theory. Scientific theories are not regarded as external to nature but rather are the way the facts themselves are seen. The lawlike relations asserted to be external to nature are currently viewed as being consistently internal, because what counts as facts are constituted by what the particular theory says about the interrelationships of the facts. Finally, the exactness of scientific language has come to be seen as inexact and metaphorical through the use of distorting historical dynamics of scientific development. Through this lens, science has used imaginative constructs which have colored the way the world is viewed and how meanings are determined. Facts are scientifically meaningful when they cohere to a particular theory (Bernstein 1983:33). Thus, scientific inquiry as understanding has become an aspect of constructional models and theories; scientific inquiry as explanation is now accepted as only a partial reflection of the reality of the world.

The evidence of the limitations of science in its explanation of the world can be seen clearly in what is called professional, scientific ethnography. This type of writing was advanced at the beginning of the twentieth century in the field of anthropology (ironically as epistemology was being challenged by phenomenology) and held sway until about the 1960s. Anthropological ethnographic writing was held to be neutral and to explain realities exactly as they were, not filtered through lenses comprised of values and interpretations. It is useful to use the field of anthropology with regard to objective ethnography, as the fieldwork within this discipline deals with cultures that often espouse belief systems that are quite foreign to what the Western anthropologist accepts as normal. Thus, those aspects of the culture considered "universal" and thus objective are brought into high relief against learned cultural mores.

While it is one thing to teach students how to do statistical studies, formulate "non-leading" questionnaires, and become invisible as one of an interchangeable number of interviewers in their own culture (except for race and gender where needed), it is quite another thing to pursue such a line in another culture. First of all, statistical studies are part of our macro culture, whether or not they are part of any particular subculture. This is not necessarily true of other cultures, especially those of the third world. Secondly, the statistician, or scientist, often stands out like a sore thumb in these other cultures. Regardless, the ethnographer, or interviewer, was supposed to be "objective" and, in the words of Kenneth Gourlay’s 1978 ground breaking study on the role of the ethnomusicologist, essentially "missing." That is, s/he was supposed to know everything about the culture, know which questions to ask and how to frame them to get objective responses, and know if the informant was being truthful, telling the researcher what s/he wanted to hear, or just lying. At the same time, the researcher

This was the goal of the anthropologist and the ethnomusicologist, into the 1970s. The ridiculousness of these goals was apparent to most who lived through their year(s) of fieldwork experience. Unfortunately, because there is no such clear cut difference in cultural background between the researcher and the informer in criminal justice, many of these issues become transparent to the overriding goal of scientific inquiry. Mainstream criminologists believe they know what the correct pitch is, the phrases are, and how the melody should be played. They think they can go, invisible, undetected, and transparent, into prisons and jails, among the police, or taking random samples from the population, and ask questions to which they receive truthful answers. (Again, problems with the concept of "truth.") They then use machines to analyze the input scientifically, assuming that the circumscribed questions are the insightful ones for the problems or hypotheses proposed. In fact, many times the hypotheses are made to fit the types of questions the method can ask so that the approach is actually limited in its scope, under the huise of being that which can be known.

Ethnographers often found the need to add a step, however. When they realized that their objective ethnographies did not portray their experiences adequately, they began to write personal narrations, which they distinguished from their impersonal, formal, objective scientific work. Before the 1980s the personal narrative was considered a subgenre that was always accompanied, and usually preceded, by the formal, objective ethnography, which was always considered to be the authoritative representation. The personal narrative was considered self-indulgent and rather trivial (1986:31). This understanding of different types of ethnography did not occur in criminal justice. Instead, all ethnography, including the objective ethnography itself, was rejected as a viable scientific tool.

While objective ethnography held reign as the method of inquiry in both anthropology and ethnomusicology, the that personal narrative was not been killed off by science. She believes that this is because the personal narrative mediates the contradiction inherent within anthropology (and one might add, within all the social sciences) between personal and scientific authority. Anthropologist Mary Louise Pratt says (as does James Clifford in his chapter "On Ethnographic Authority" (1988:21-54)) that fieldwork is founded, to a large degree in experiences that are both subjective and sensuous (Pratt 1986:32). .

The resulting academic text, however, is supposed to conform to the rigor of scientific discourse where authority resides in the elimination of the experiencing fieldworker. This results in some major problems. First, even scientific ethnographers have long lamented that their writings leave out or deplete some of their most important insights, including self-knowledge. Second, this results in really boring ethnographic writing. Why is this writing so uninteresting, asks Pratt (Pratt 1986:33). The answer lies in the ethnographic use of the language of science, which deals with only one dimension of reality. By cutting itself off from other types of knowledge, by restricting itself to the universal, it restricts its vision of reality to one of shallowness, and in the end winds up forming its own type of narrative.

Goffman’s "Frame Analysis"

Erving Goffman, in his seminal work Frame Analysis, follows the tradition of pre-phenomenologist William James who, instead of asking what reality is, asks the question: under what circumstances do we think things are real. That is, the important quality about "realness" is that we believe it is real, in contrast to those things we believe to be unreal because of their lack of this quality. This then leads to the question: under what circumstances is such a feeling generated? Part of the answer James gave included the notions of selective attention, close involvement, and noncontradiction of what is known. While some contradictions can be tolerated, there needs to be a change in belief when that quantity is surpassed. James also pointed out that there were different worlds that can be real to us, such as: the world of the senses, the world of scientific truths, the world of abstract philosophical truths, the worlds of myth and supernatural beliefs, the madman’s world, etc. Unfortunately, according to Goffman, at this point James "copped out" by attributing to the world of the senses a special status, that of the "realist reality" (Goffman 1974:2-3).

Goffman, however, continued James’ construct of different worlds. It was Goffman’s conjecture that when a person realizes a particular event exists, it is seen through one or more major frameworks. He names these major frames "primary," and defines them as ways of interpreting the event. Goffman calls them "primary" because there is no prior frame on which the person is basing this frame. Rather, it is the frame itself that is rendering the event meaningful. What the frame does is to allow the user to locate, perceive, identify and label a seemingly infinite number of concrete occurrences onto something that means something to that person. However s/he may not be able to articulate the organizational features of this frame (Goffman 1974:21).

Goffman sees two broad classes of primary frameworks: natural and social. Natural frameworks are seen as unguided events that are due to totally "natural" determinants. They are undirected, unoriented, unanimated, unguided and "purely physical." There is no willful agent involved in causality or intentionality. These types of natural frameworks are found in the physical and biological sciences (Goffman 1974:21-22).

Social frameworks provide a fundamental understanding for events that involve an intelligence, a willful agent. Thus they incorporate will, aim and control. In these cases we have "guided doings," which are subject to "standards." Goffman includes in these standards the ideas of honesty, efficiency, economy, safety, elegance, tactfulness and good taste. He also sees this as a sustained "serial management of consequentiality." That is, there is continuous corrective control. Selection of the particular framework within this class is made with the involvement of motive and intent. While the weather may be given as an example of a natural frame, the weather report is an example of a social frame (Goffman 1974:22).

In our culture, we believe that we can tap into the ongoing natural world and manipulate its determinacy, providing we do not interfere with its natural design. We also believe, according to Goffman, that whatever we decide to do will be conditioned by natural constraints. Thus, while natural events can occur without intelligent intervention, the reverse is not true. Any socially guided event must enter the realm of the natural order. This means it can also be partially analyzed within a natural frame. Social acts, then, permit two fundamental types of understanding: one that is constrained by the natural world, and a second, that has meaning through the particular world or worlds in which the actor is involved. This can vary considerably from person to person. Goffman’s example is a game of checkers. The natural order pertains to the actual moving of the checkers; the social order involves the choices of moves made. The latter can be made in a variety of ways, including the use of the voice, gestures, and physically shifting a checker. There is also a difference between an ill-chosen move and a clumsy move. All these maneuvers involve rules. However, the rules change with the specific frame (Goffman 1974:23-24).

We perceive events in terms of primary frameworks, which prescribe the way we discuss the event. According to Goffman, we also often apply more than one frame during any one moment (Goffman 1974:25). Although an individual can be "wrong" in his/her interpretation, the elements and processes s/he assumes in the reading of the activity often are ones that are manifested by the activity. Thus, a correspondence or isomorphism is claimed between a person’s perception and how s/he organizes it even though there are probably many different ways that the perception could have been informed, but which haven’t been utilized (Goffman 1974:25-26) Those who use statistical methods often deny that they are using social frameworks at all. Instead, they believe that the use of the scientific methodology precludes any subjective interference. Goffman would point out that they are actually using more than one.

Two major writers on the history of scientific thought are Thomas Kuhn and Harvard physicist Gerald Holton. Kuhn was instrumental in identifying issues that have become focal in our conception of science. While they had been anticipated by others, it was still Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolution that consolidated much of the thinking. Holton’s book Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought focuses on particular historical problems within science. These include the existence of unverifiable, unfalsifiable and yet not really arbitrary hypotheses; the realization that particular themata belong not only to specifically scientific ideas, but also come from other areas of the imagination; and that there is a nascent phase of science, which is part of the personal context of discovery. Holton states that all philosophies of science accept the meaningfulness of empirical matters of fact (which he reduces to meter readings) and logical and mathematical propositions (which he reduces to tautologies). These he corresponds to a set of orthogonal x- and y- axes and defines as creating a contingency plane. He discusses contingency analysis as the relevant analyses which are rooted in empiricism or positivism. This means that those problems not found in the thusly constructed xy plane cannot be asked. While the existence of such questions is not denied, they are excluded from scientific discussions. It is Holton’s contention that this results in excluding a necessary and active component of scientific work that deals with the existence of scientific preconceptions (Holton 1988:1-13).

While their terminology differs, both Kuhn and Holton discuss how scientists "do" science. Kuhn distinguishes between normal science and scientific revolutions. Holton talks about public vs. private science. Normal, public science is defined as the process of development-by-accumulation, science-as-an-institution, a growing body of knowledge based on the general acceptance of ideas that are meaningful to scientists. That is what mainstream criminologists do. It is operationally definable, largely quantitative in character, and based on concepts that have been accepted in diverse situations by the community of people working within its boundaries (Kuhn 1996:2; Holton 1988:404-406).. That is, it is bounded by people who speak its language, and agree with its symbolic representation.

Kuhn’s scientific revolution and Holton’s private science, however, is artistic and creative, with its own vocabulary. It is speculative, sometimes nonverbal, and often carried out beyond carefully controlled methods and laboratories. When one examines the history of science, it becomes obvious that there has been no regular procedure, no logical system of discovery and no simple, continuous development. Some of the most important conclusions have been drawn from erroneous hypotheses, misinterpretations and chance discoveries. The pursuit of science is not scientific (Holton 1988:5, 402-404). As Albert Einstein said: "‘Science as an existing, finished [corpus of knowledge] is the most objective, most unpersonal [thing] human beings know, [but] science as something coming into being, as aim, is just as subjective and psychologically conditioned as any other of man’s efforts,’ and its study is what one should ‘permit oneself also.’" Holton adds that Einstein felt that special attention should be devoted to what he called "the personal struggle" in the analysis of scientific development (Holton 1988:6-7).

The realization that logic has little to do with the cognitive act of "doing science" discredits the fundamental, epistemological account of science. This is not to demean the scientific approach, but rather to reposition it. Instead of placing science in the role of foundational explicator, it should be seen as one particular way in which humans tell stories and reconfigure their world. Thus, instead of responding to scientific explanations as foundational, it has become evident that they are a way of narrating the world, another language game with its own rhetoric, invented by people in order to create order out of the chaos of the world. Explanation becomes a way to understand. And as such science becomes subsumed under hermeneutics (Madison 1988:46-48).

What is clear in both quantitative and structural scientific explanations is that reductive explanations of the human and personal are neither human nor personal. Such arguments make it impossible to achieve any self-understanding because it is precisely the self that is excluded from the equation. Thus, one major question Gary Madison (ala Holton) raises is: can the scientist who tries to explain everything in the world, explain scientifically why he wants to explain everything? (Madison 1988:48-49).

To the hermeneuticist, explanation is a stage of understanding that ultimately strives toward self-knowledge. As such, explanation never gives us the ultimate "truth" as it is a partial, non-totalizable mode of understanding. The social sciences are not reducible to the mold of the natural sciences, because by definition they seek to understand the self as both the origin and goal of all understandings, and are therefore inclusive of the natural sciences, going beyond a particular methodology and world construct. The ultimate discovery of Husserl’s life-world is that it discredits the natural science model for the social sciences. It would be nice if mainstream criminal justice would move into the 20^th century.

REFERENCES

Young, T. R. Postmodern Phenomenology