CC200 Chapter 5: Chapter 5- Explaining Crime and Delinquency
Document Summary
Perspectives range from the biological and physiological psychological and sociological: academic vs. scientific views. Empirical: based on observation, experience or experiment, rather than on theory or philosophy. Postmodernists: those who reject or challenge all that has been considered to be modern. Auguste comte (1798-1857: founding father of sociology, first to argue that society could best be understood by applying the scientific method to its study. Assumptions that human behaviour is determined by natural laws, and they believed that their task, as scientists as to discover these laws. Theory: integrated sets of propositions that seek to offer explanations of a problem. Establishing a law or a cause is one way of explaining an event. 3 conditions have to be met before causality can be established. It has to be established that there is a relationship between concepts both within and among the propositions that constitute a theory.
