The Uncertain Texture of Discourse on the Dangerous Psychopath

The topic tackled by this work concerns the links between two sense-making practices–the medical-psychiatric one and the legal one–in which the relationships between language, cognition and society are traced by discursive modulation of the “certainty/uncertainty” axis, which characterises the processes of sensemaking activated in representing reality and in the socially shared aspiration of truth. The binding nature of this system is even more evident when, like in this work, two totally different epistemological worlds and communicative registers meet with particular reference to the “mentally ill” perpetrators and victims of crimes.