Collaboration and Its Political Functions

What functions does “collaboration” play in our moral and political practices and how did it come to play those roles? We use the term “collaboration” to identify a valued partnership, but it also names a morally compromised association and functions as a reason for blaming and punishing complicitous behavior. However, it has also played nefarious political roles: shoring up patriarchy, legitimizing ethnic cleansing, and bolstering a myth of national unity. “Collaboration” plays various roles because it is both ambiguous and vague. It is ambiguous in that there are multiple conceptions of collaboration, and it is vague because it contains borderline cases that are difficult, even impossible, to resolve. An exploration of “collaboration” combined with the history of its coming of age shows why its study is so vexing and how it functions in unexpected and disturbing ways.

The Concept of an “Act of a Sexual Nature” in Criminal Law

All jurisdictions assume a concept of an act of a sexual nature by regulating sex crimes. Until the sex revolution and feminist movements for equality in sexual relations, criminal law was mostly concerned with specific types of sexual acts, particularly non-marital sexual intercourse. With the paradigm shift of recent years, criminalization tends to embrace all acts of a sexual nature with another person without her valid consent. Whether the law contains a definition of a sexual act or not, borderline cases show that neither merely objective criteria nor purely subjective elements can serve as basis for the description of the conduct under prohibition. Our Article tries to overcome this deficit in the criminal law theory. Sexual acts should not be understood through the metaphor of a “picture,” as German legal scholars believe, but with the metaphor of a script played out by an actor as sexual theorists put it.

Vagueness-Related Partial Belief and the Constitution of Borderline Cases

This chapter, specially written for a Philosophy and Phenomenological Research book symposium on the Stephen Schiffer’s The Things We Mean, is focused on Schiffer’s proposal there concerning the most central and important question about vagueness: namely, what, specifically, something’s being a borderline case of a vague expression consists in. Schiffer argues for a new kind of approach, according to which vagueness is constitutively a psychological phenomenon, grounded in a supposedly distinctive propositional attitude taken by practitioners of vague discourse: vagueness-related partial belief (VPB), contrasting in ways Schiffer details with standard partial belief (SPB). Two principal problems are raised for this proposal. First, on Schiffer’s account, VPB looks to be characteristic of a wider range of kinds of indeterminacy besides the targeted soritical vagueness. Second, there is an awkward dilemma arising over whether or why a thinker could not, as a matter of psychological contingency, adopt a VPB towards a precise proposition.

Vagueness

This chapter centres on what it terms the Vagueness Trilemma: that what may impress as the only three possible types of view about what vagueness is—namely, that it is a matter of semantic indeterminacy, that it originates in rebus, and the epistemicist idea that it is a matter of our ineluctable ignorance about fully determinate matters— are each open to serious, indeed arguably fatal, objections. The chapter is organized about the possible attitudes to three interrelated, nodal theses. Bivalence—are borderline statements bivalent? Third possibility—do they possess some third alethic status—lack of truth value or some third truth value? And Verdict Exclusion: is knowledge of truth value precluded in borderline cases? It is argued that there are five consistent combinations of acceptance and non-acceptance of the three nodal issues, and that an attitude of agnosticism to all three, and a consequent broadly intuitionistic attitude to vagueness, is the way out of the Trilemma.

On the Characterization of Borderline Cases

This chapter was originally written for Gary Ostertag’s edition of the festschrift for Stephen Schiffer, Meanings and Other Things (Oxford University Press, 2016). It centres on Schiffer’s treatment of the characterization problem: the problem of saying what being a borderline case of a concept expressed by a vague expression consists in. While broadly sympathetic to Schiffer’s approach, the chapter takes issue with two aspects of it. Schiffer endorses Verdict Exclusion: the doctrine that a ‘polar verdict’ about a borderline case cannot be an expression of knowledge. This endorsement comes at too high a cost: among other things, it conflicts with the entitlement intuition—the intuition that there will be no point in a Sorites sequence at which it is mandatory to return neither of the polar verdicts. The chapter argues for agnosticism about Verdict Exclusion (‘Liberalism’). It also rejects Schiffer’s idea that a special genre of partial belief—vagueness-related partial belief—plays an essential role in characterizing the possession conditions for vague concepts.

The Question To Be Faced Is One of Fact: H.L.A. Hart’s Legal Theory Through His View of International Law

H.L.A. Hart says that The Concept of Law is focused on municipal or domestic law because that is the “central case”1 for the usage of the word ‘law.’ At the beginning of the book he states that “at various points in this book the reader will find discussions of the borderline cases where legal theorists have felt doubts about the application of the expression ‘law’ or ‘legal system,’ but the suggested resolution of these doubts, which he will also find here, is only a secondary concern of the book.”2 Yet among those borderline cases there is one that is rather intriguing, since Hart closely discusses a particular instance of them: it is international law, to which he devotes an entire chapter—the final one—of The Concept of Law. My goal in this article is therefore to make clear why the ‘resolution’ of the borderline case of international law is not entirely ‘secondary’ to Hart’s overall project in The Concept of Law and, in so doing, to show that Chapter X is not as unhappy as many think it is.

Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness

Either consciousness appeared suddenly in living beings so that its appearance is like that of a light switch being turned on or it arose through intermediate stages. On the former view, consciousness is an on/off matter, but once it arose, it became richer and richer through time rather as a beam of light may become brighter and broader in its sweep. On the latter view, consciousness is not an on/off matter. There are shades of gray. Consciousness arose gradually just as life did, becoming richer through time as animal brains became more complex. I argue that both these views encounter insuperable difficulties and thus that a kind of paradox arises. The way out of the paradox is to accept that the various species of consciousness are vague, admitting of borderline cases, and are to be accounted for within a representationalist view of conscious states but that consciousness itself, or rather a central element of consciousness I call “consciousness*”, is sharp. Consciousness*, I claim, is a fundamental feature of micro-reality, and thus it did not evolve, unlike conscious states. The view with which I end up presents novel solutions to three important problems (of undirected consciousness, of combination, and of tiny, psychological subjects). It also takes up the question of how consciousness can be causally efficacious with respect to animal behavior. The final chapter of the book turns to the question of where in the brain macro-consciousness is located and which animal brains so evolved as to support conscious states.