ABSTRACT
Positivism produces an avalanche of nonsignificant findings, even in a system of scientific production that is biased in favor of highlighting significant effects, because specificity of context is overwhelmingly important in deciding whether a crime will occur or a war will break out. Because positivist science progresses slowly, it never delivers anything better than theoretical structures that are half true, half crumbling, as more and more older blocks fall out of place. Positivist criminology can help by locating which theories have some partial explanatory power some of the time and which theories are best not to clutter our thinking because they rarely explain anything. The historian, unlike the positivist, sees the future as requiring a different explanatory frame from the past, always flowing in a stream of time from the past, where the past has predictive value of sorts, but where that predictive value is compromised by the way time always changes context.
