A Contrastivist Manifesto

Abstract

General contrastivism holds that all claims of reasons are relative to contrast classes. This approach applies to explanation (reasons why things happen), moral philosophy (reasons for action), and epistemology (reasons for belief), and it illuminates moral dilemmas, free will, and the grue paradox. In epistemology, contrast classes point toward an account of justified belief that is compatible with reliabilism and other externalisms. Contrast classes also provide a model for Pyrrhonian scepticism based on suspending belief about which contrast class is relevant. This view contrasts with contextualism, invariantism, and Schaffer’s contrastivism.

Keywords:

• Contrastivism
• Contextualism
• Invariantism
• Epistemology
• Pyrrhonian Scepticism

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Robert Audi, Martijn Blaauw, Bob Fogelin, Klemens Kappel, Ram Neta, Jonathan Schaffer, Roy Sorensen, and Christie Thomas for their help with this paper.

Notes

[1] This distinction takes the place of character versus content in Sinnott‐Armstrong (2004).

[2] Of course, (4) and (5) would not be translated in the same way into French, so there is a kind of meaning that (4) and (5) do not share. My notion of sentence‐meaning is weaker, so an elliptical sentence has the same sentence‐meaning when the ellipsis is filled out. In this sense, “12 is even” has the same sentence meaning as “12 is an even number”, and “New York is south” means “New York is south of the relevant point”.

[3] Some contextualists claim that “knows” and “justified” refer to different two‐place relations in different contexts, but those versions are already refuted by arguments of Schaffer and of Morton and Karjalainen, so I will focus on a version of contextualism that admits the need for contrast classes but claims that the context determines which contrast class is relevant. Contextualists often say instead that context affects the content of “knows”, but this means that context affects the truth‐conditions of “knows without qualification”, so it is equivalent to the claim that context affects which contrast class is relevant in my specified sense.