27/04: Fear versus Reason
Category: Modes of Explanation
Posted by: Admin
I have recently finished reading CRITIQUE OF CRIMINAL REASON by husband and wife pair "Michael Gregorio".
This novel is set in Konigsberg, Prussia in 1804 immediately prior to the death of Immanuel Kant. It is a relatively simple if unusual crime thriller in which a young magistrate of the time seeks to establish the identity of a killer with horrific habits - which of course, he does.
Here I make no comment on the literary merits of the book or its entertainment value - except to say that I found it instructive and intriguing in a vaguely depressing manner. It is of interest though in describing, perhaps implicitly perhaps not, two quite different ways of approaching the issue and their differing implications for the conduct of criminal investigation and accompanying legal process.
Of interest is the abrupt change (occasioned by Kant) in modes of explanation and the processes which might be employed in finding out who is guilty. The traditional means of the day for establishing guilt appears to have been the (then entirely legal and accepted as legitimate) conventional and orthodox process of finding "likely suspects" and extracting a confession from them, - possibly by interview, interrogation and not unusually by various grisly torturing prcedures.
What we might recognise today as "reason" played no especially explicit part in explanations sought for the phenomena observed. To the extent that explanations were sought, overarching "models" such as "the devil" were called upon by the populace and arguably the judiciary.
What was specifically absent from the process was any systematic method of trying to establish, on the basis of any empirical observation coupled with deduction - or even induction - what the sequence of events leading to the murders was and who therefore might be the culprit. Evidence of an entirely circumstantial nature dominated the reasoning and the investigation seemed to follow a path of the investigator "dreaming up" motive or possible scenario and then "testing" the resulting story through torture of likely (and unlikely) suspects. In short there was no great interest in finding out or explaining "what happened".
The book shows how Kant by contrast was advocating (and I summarise the twists, turns and unpicking of the workings of his mind as seen by others steeped in the orthodoxy) what we might term a hypothetico deductive approach with explicit hypotheses tested against empirical evidence in what is now a form of the standard logical positivist scientific approach to problem solving or at least generating plausible explanations.
More broadly he was advocating reason over myth and fear. Reason over received wisdom. Reason coupled with observation over expectation driven by fear and myth. In the book his protege and at times rather limp hero advances this cause to good if predictable effect.
The pre Kant model is of interest as well in that it seems to be similar to the logic driving other like processes - for example, the logic of the inquisition or the assessment of whether someone was a witch (the drowning test for example). Torture until confession rather than application of logic.
While from today's lofty perspective we might see the differences in the descriptive and explanatory infrastructure employed pre and post Kant as the difference between "educated and uneducated", "enlightened and unenlightened" or "sophisticated versus naive", the book ought also to underline the massive impact which expectations of what can be explained have on what is explained, how we explain it and how we go about explaining it.
Expecting to find the devil as the hand in a series of murders may mean that other explanations are precluded by the very mental apparatus adopted at the outset. As the finale to the book suggests, Kant himself had some concerns on these grounds about reason itself.
This novel is set in Konigsberg, Prussia in 1804 immediately prior to the death of Immanuel Kant. It is a relatively simple if unusual crime thriller in which a young magistrate of the time seeks to establish the identity of a killer with horrific habits - which of course, he does.
Here I make no comment on the literary merits of the book or its entertainment value - except to say that I found it instructive and intriguing in a vaguely depressing manner. It is of interest though in describing, perhaps implicitly perhaps not, two quite different ways of approaching the issue and their differing implications for the conduct of criminal investigation and accompanying legal process.
Of interest is the abrupt change (occasioned by Kant) in modes of explanation and the processes which might be employed in finding out who is guilty. The traditional means of the day for establishing guilt appears to have been the (then entirely legal and accepted as legitimate) conventional and orthodox process of finding "likely suspects" and extracting a confession from them, - possibly by interview, interrogation and not unusually by various grisly torturing prcedures.
What we might recognise today as "reason" played no especially explicit part in explanations sought for the phenomena observed. To the extent that explanations were sought, overarching "models" such as "the devil" were called upon by the populace and arguably the judiciary.
What was specifically absent from the process was any systematic method of trying to establish, on the basis of any empirical observation coupled with deduction - or even induction - what the sequence of events leading to the murders was and who therefore might be the culprit. Evidence of an entirely circumstantial nature dominated the reasoning and the investigation seemed to follow a path of the investigator "dreaming up" motive or possible scenario and then "testing" the resulting story through torture of likely (and unlikely) suspects. In short there was no great interest in finding out or explaining "what happened".
The book shows how Kant by contrast was advocating (and I summarise the twists, turns and unpicking of the workings of his mind as seen by others steeped in the orthodoxy) what we might term a hypothetico deductive approach with explicit hypotheses tested against empirical evidence in what is now a form of the standard logical positivist scientific approach to problem solving or at least generating plausible explanations.
More broadly he was advocating reason over myth and fear. Reason over received wisdom. Reason coupled with observation over expectation driven by fear and myth. In the book his protege and at times rather limp hero advances this cause to good if predictable effect.
The pre Kant model is of interest as well in that it seems to be similar to the logic driving other like processes - for example, the logic of the inquisition or the assessment of whether someone was a witch (the drowning test for example). Torture until confession rather than application of logic.
While from today's lofty perspective we might see the differences in the descriptive and explanatory infrastructure employed pre and post Kant as the difference between "educated and uneducated", "enlightened and unenlightened" or "sophisticated versus naive", the book ought also to underline the massive impact which expectations of what can be explained have on what is explained, how we explain it and how we go about explaining it.
Expecting to find the devil as the hand in a series of murders may mean that other explanations are precluded by the very mental apparatus adopted at the outset. As the finale to the book suggests, Kant himself had some concerns on these grounds about reason itself.
