Criminal profiling as a plotting activity based upon abductive processes

In this article the authors analyze the nature and aims of criminal profiling from a theoretical point of view. The need to become increasingly “scientific” has given rise to the modern approaches of profiling, which have been particularly successful in cases of serial homicides and sex crimes, given that compulsive (perverse) acts, because of their ritual nature, have been described as being more easily foreseeable and presumably linkable to the psychological and even personal characteristics of a given criminal. On this basis, the authors analyze profiling from an epistemological point of view and show how, in the concrete activity of profiling, profilers depart from the “certainty” of the scientific models (those that are based on deductive–inductive processes); the epistemological basis of reasoning changes as there is no longer an induction–deduction model but rather an abductive model (as conceived and explained by Peirce) in which the importance of plotting (the weaving of a narrative) becomes greater.