Vérité romanesque et fictions scientifiques : Philip K. Dick chez les criminologues

Abstract

This paper investigates scientists’ conceptual borrowings from science fiction through the case of Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report. In this short story, K. Dick depicts New York City as a crime-free society, thanks to the work of a police division, Precrime, whose function is to arrest criminals-to-be before they actually commit any crime. This writing has spurred academics’ attention, including criminologists and neuroscientists. While some of them propose a utopian reading of K. Dick’s ideas, other accentuate its dystopian dimension, depending on whether they are proponents or critics of the use of predictive methods in the criminal justice system. Moreover, we show that while critics tend to inscribe The Minority Report into a regime of truth that tells something about the current state of our societies, proponents tend to elaborate futuristic visions that come to complement and extend Philip K. Dick’s.

Keywords

• truth
• science fiction
• criminology
• neuroscience
• Philip K. Dick
• The Minority Report