The Knowledge Relation: Binary or Ternary?

Abstract

Contrastivism is the claim that the knowledge relation is ternary, it relates three relata: a subject, a proposition, and a class of contrastive propositions. The present paper is a discussion of Jonathan Schaffer’s arguments in favour of contrastivism. The case is made that these are unconvincing: the traditional binary account of knowledge can handle the phenomena that ternarity is claimed to handle in a superior way.

Keywords:

• Knowledge
• Contrastivism

Acknowledgements

For comments on earlier drafts of this paper the author would like to thank Martijn Blaauw, Arianna Betti, Lieven Decock, Duncan Pritchard, Cornelis van Putten, Walter Sinnott‐Armstrong and Mariëtte Willemsen.

Notes

[1] But: he does say “that knowledge ascriptions certify that the subject is able to answer the question” (Schaffer 2005, 236). This, however, does not mean that Schaffer’s contrastivism is of the ascriptive kind. The quote only explains what knowledge ascriptions are for—they certify that the subject is able to answer the question. Later in his article, Schaffer (2005, 244–54) explicitly talks about knowledge ascriptions; but there the argument is that contrastivism (of the subjective kind) is true because it does a very good job in decoding knowledge ascriptions. This again suggests that Schaffer intends his contrastivism to be of the subjective kind.

[2] It should be noted that this premise is not explicitly endorsed in Schaffer (2005). In Schaffer (2007), however, (1) figures explicitly. So what I offer is a reconstruction of Schaffer’s first argument.

[3] Or at least not the result of inquiry in any ordinary sense of that term. One could always broaden the notion of inquiry, so that the examples I mention in the text also become cases of inquiry.