Contrastivity and Indistinguishability

Abstract

We give a general description of a class of contrastive constructions, intended to capture what is common to contrastive knowledge, belief, hope, fear, understanding and other cases where one expresses a propositional attitude in terms of “rather than”. The crucial element is the agent’s incapacity to distinguish some possibilities from others. Contrastivity requires a course‐graining of the set of possible worlds. As a result, contrastivity will usually cut across logical consequence, so that an agent can have an attitude to p rather than q but not to r rather than q, where r is a logical consequence of p. We relate these ideas to some general issues about thought, such as the question of whether all possibilities that can be distinguished in emotion can be distinguished in belief.

Keywords:

• Contrastivity
• Knowledge
• Belief
• Emotion
• Possibility