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Re: Defining 'rape'

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I think the title 'defining rape' might be a bit of a red herring. I too am
sceptical about the project of defining terms in necessary and sufficient
conditions. This scepticism certainly seems applicable in the case of rape.
Hence my emphasis on the vagueness of the term's extension. 

I think the way I discussed the possibility of example 1 being a counterexample
to my putative definition is very unclear. What I really think is that example
1 is a case somewhere way out on the fringes of the extension of rape. So
example 1 is a way of showing that rape has vague boundaries, that it cannot be
precisely defined.

However, Matthew seems to suggest that there is no value in trying to specify
the family of properties which contribute to an act's being an instance of
rape. I don't think that's true. There are many terms which we cannot define in
terms of necessary and sufficient conditions: take the biological species
'canis lupus', which includes everything from the wolf to the poodle. There is
probably no characteristic possessed by all and only members of canis lupus,
yet clarifying a range of properties which tend to be instantiated by that
group of creatures can facilitate our inductive practices with the concept
canis lupus. For example, we can reliably infer from the fact that most
instances of canis lupus have had four legs, that the next observed instance
will have four legs. (The purpose of clarifying the family of properties which
contribute to an act's being a case of rape is to facilitate just legal
practice.)

This is a bit far from the rape topic, but it is my answer to Matthew's question
about what we might put in place of the definition/counterexample dialectic. I
think that classifying objects into kinds which instantiate a family of
properties whose co-occurrence is sustained by recurring causal mechanisms,
facilitates inductive inferences about future states of affairs involving those
kinds. This is the correct method of inference for both science and
philosophy.

 


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