Abstract

The traditional understanding of the criminal law’s concept of dolus is grounded on its definition as the conjunction of a volitional and a cognitive attitude towards the satisfaction of the abstract description that specifies the corresponding offense. Although so-called “cognitivist” conceptions persuasively argue for the redundancy of the purported volitional component, the theoretical adequacy of the recourse to the concept of knowledge is very rarely called into question. The display of a teleological-analytical model for clarifying the general structure of a criminal offense can show that, according to its distinctively ascriptive function, the concept of dolus ought to be taken as requiring a predictive belief referred to an (unjustified) instance of the relevant actus reus, whereas such a predictive belief need not satisfy the semantic and epistemic conditions for an attribution of knowledge.