To form a clear view of the origins of criminology and present-day practices in
criminal justice, criminologists need to recognize phrenology as one of their
progenitors. Although phrenology is dismissed as a
‘pseudo-science’ and mocked as ‘bumpology’,
it in fact constituted an important early science of the mind, and the theories that
phrenologists generated in the fields today called criminology, criminal
jurisprudence and penology influenced those fields long after the phrenological map
of the brain had been forgotten. Coming to terms with phrenology requires rejecting
simple distinctions between ‘science’ and
‘pseudo-science’. It leads to a better understanding of the
scientific project of criminology and, more broadly, to a better understanding of
the nature of social-scientific knowledge
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