Undermining the Case for Contrastivism

Abstract

A number of philosophers have recently defended “contrastivist” theories of knowledge, according to which knowledge is a relation between at least the following three relata: a knower, a proposition, and a contrast set. I examine six arguments that Jonathan Schaffer has given for this thesis, and show that those arguments do not favour contrastivism over a rival view that I call “evidentiary relativism”. I then argue that evidentiary relativism accounts for more data than does contrastivism.

Keywords:

• Contrastivism
• Evidence
• Knowledge
• Scepticism
• Contextualism

Acknowledgements

As always, the author is grateful to Jonathan Schaffer for his astute and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The author is also grateful to comments from Walter Sinnott‐Armstrong and Dylan Sabo.

Notes

[1] Schaffer (2004, 77): “Contrastivism is the view that knowledge is a ternary relation of the form Kspq, where q is a contrast proposition”. Schaffer (2005a, 235): “The contrastivist says that knowledge is a ternary, contrastive relation: s knows that p rather than q”. Contrastivism is independently defended by Johnsen (2001), Morton and Karjalainen (2003), and the introduction to Sinnott‐Armstrong (2004). I focus on Schaffer’s formulation and defence of contrastivism in this paper, but a full treatment of contrastivism would of course need to be much more extensive.

[2] Schaffer (2005a, 240).

[3] Here, space constraints prevent me from considering four additional arguments that Schaffer (2005a) gives for the question‐relativity of declarative knowledge ascriptions. Also, space constraints prevent me from going into the various anti‐contextualist arguments of Schaffer (2005b). I must reserve consideration of those for another occasion.

[4] The example is adapted from DeRose (1992).