Contrastivism in Epistemology

Abstract

In this introduction to the special issue of Social Epistemology on epistemological contrastivism, I make some remarks on the history of contrastivism, describe three main versions of contrastivism, and offer a guide through the papers that compose this issue.

Keywords:

• Contrastivism
• Knowledge
• Relevant Alternatives Theory

Acknowledgements

Five of the papers in this issue (Duncan Pritchard, Ram Neta, Jonathan Schaffer, Walter Sinnott‐Armstrong, and René van Woudenberg) were presented at a conference held at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Aarhus (Denmark) in February 2005; the other two papers (Jonathan Kvanvig, and Adam Morton) were commissioned for this issue. The author would like to thank the members of the Namicona Research Centre—and especially Lars Gundersen, Jakob Howhy, and Jesper Kallestrup—for making this conference possible.

Notes

[1] See Dretske (1970, 1981).

[2] Other versions of contrastivism can be found in Rieber (1998) and Johnsen (2001). For discussion of Schaffer’s version of contrastivism, see Blaauw (2008a, 2008b, 2008c).

[3] The reader is encouraged to consult the individual papers in this issue for more detail on the differences between the various versions of contrastivism.