Criminalistics: The Place in the System of Scientific Knowledge and Its Nature

Abstract

The key role in the development of fundamental and applied sciences at the present stage of scientific and technological progress is played by various processes of integration and differentiation of scientific knowledge, including the increase, expansion and deepening, in particular, of academic sciences. At the same time, new trends in development are being studied and traditional, long-established ideas about their place and role in the system of scientific branches of knowledge are being reconsidered. Today, there is clearly a situation in which the desire to revise, correct, develop something new (different) has become a very common phenomenon. One of these sciences is criminalistics. Scientific ideas about its subject have changed several times since its inception. The purpose of this study is to identify the most common ideas about the nature and character of the science; establish changes in the content and motives for reconsidering its key provisions. The source of the data were the results of a study of the most famous forensic scientists of the middle and end of the last century, as well as some fundamental works of the author’s teams of the last years of the publication. In the course of the study, four scientific concepts on the subject of criminalistics were identified, a brief description of them was given.