ABSTRACT
Even profilers disavowing any theoretical affiliation or theory itself use language to think (actually my inference is that they think, and think in this manner, as thinking is unobservable) and communicate. And theoretical assumptions permeate language. What follows are five different languages of profiling, their assumptions about human psychology, and how-when salient-the psychology interacts with biological and social events. The goal for readers is to understand the languages outlined herein and how they might be applied to profiling. Whether the concepts and theories are true in some absolute sense is largely irrelevant. What is relevant is how useful they are in navigating social life in general and in the profiling quests for prediction, post-diction, peri-diction, understanding, and influence. As American psychologist Brad Piekkola (2011) wrote, “The language for personality need not be consistent with personality.” That is, whatever may be happening may be at least partially inaccessible to language in that language may be both a knowledge facilitator and constraint. This could bring readers to consult philosophical skeptics from the Greek Gorgias to the French Jacques Derrida as part of profiling training. And I do advocate for philosophical training for profilers in Chapter 10.
