Constructing facticity: How underdetermination drives communication for special purposes

The research project aims at investigating dynamic processes of exchange and oscillation between psychiatric and legal communication from the 19th to the 20th century in order to get a hold of the resulting constructions of factuality. In doing so, the focus will be on the behavioral problems referred to as dissocial personality disorders in psychiatric diagnosis as objects of negotiation in interdisciplinary communication.

Since the end of the 18th century, these personality disorders have not only been part of the basic body of psychiatric pathologies, but are also taken up as a forensically relevant subject and regularly find their way into jurisprudence. There, for a long time, they were referred to as mental abnormality. Today, however, § 20 StGB speaks of severe other mental disorder. Despite diachronic variability and controversy in the descriptions of these disorders, the law nevertheless resorts to these descriptions and accepts them as fact. This raises the question of how a scientific object – considering its disputed status and the difficulty of its determination – is constituted, and how the knowledge associated with it is transformed in the interaction of the various disciplines.

Thus, the research project will investigate the interactions between psychiatric constructions of the non-normal and their meanings for law and jurisprudence. In this way, the aspects of underdetermination as a motor of technical communication, which have hardly been outlined in technical language research so far, will be captured and reflected upon.

In this way, this approach will thereby exemplarily retrace the successive development of a technical language as an independent

discipline of knowledge and science by means of psychiatric technical communication. In addition, the approach will record interdisciplinary adoption, further development and influence processes - namely on the basis of the interdependent exchange as a communicative relationship between psychiatric and legal specialist communication.