JUNE 24 - 26, 2021 / WORLDWIDE

#2021ISSTVIRTUALSUMMIT

SCHEDULE 

Scientific Reasoning and Forensic Psychotherapy

Scientific reasoning also affects everyday life. For example, in the field of forensic work: here it is necessary to determine whether the dangerousness of a criminal has changed. Deductive- nomological methods are one way of finding this out. These have problems; for example, when working with offense hypotheses, it is often not clear whether a feature falsification is an indication of a change in dangerousness or of a false basic hypothesis. It therefore seems attractive to think further about scientific reasoning within forensics - quite in the sense of basic research. Charles Sanders Peirce's three-stage logic of reasoning lends itself to this: It is shown how common problems of inference can be avoided by using an interplay of abduction, deduction and induction. And how this opens up a way of working that, among other things, realizes an abduction-deduction-induction procedure, which looks like this in detail:

• -  In a first step, based on the initial analysis of a person x, which focuses not only on the main offense and previous offenses, but on a chain of biographical events, a presumed, vague assignment of this comprehensive "narrative data package" to a specific risk group could be determined abductively; i.e. the person x would first be assigned - with these group names being understood as placeholders - to the group "offenders with malignant narcissism", whereby such a group is always specified by clear "risk characteristic trends".

• -  In a second step, it would then be deductively derived which risk characteristics person x would still have to exhibit if the group attribution is correct.

• -  Finally, in a third step, it would be checked inductively whether the deductively deduced characteristics can actually be found with a view to already known or newly added narratives. Which then confirms the group membership or makes it increasingly questionable. Which then makes a new abductive conclusion necessary.

• -  On this basis, it could be clearly argued - if a solid group membership is achieved - that changes in characteristics that can be observed then are actually changes in dangerousness and not falsifications of the offense hypothesis. How with this solid affiliation to groups that are determined by trends, probabilities would then also come into play that have an actual significance with regard to recidivism.

  Such an approach can be excellently linked to the schema therapy model, since schemas or modes can also be re-interpreted as signs, which are at the heart of Peirce's thinking:

  With the help of the basic schema therapy model, the aforementioned narratives can be formulated much more precisely, which increases the quality of the inference as well as the results.

  
  

About the Presenter

Christian Eigner

•Training in "Infant Child Observation" at the "Psycho analytische Akademie Wien" (Psycho analytical Academy Vienna), 

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