Conceptions of Knowledge

One of the most recent trends in epistemology is contrastivism. It can be characterized as the thesis that knowledge is a ternary relation between a subject, a proposition known and a contrast proposition. According to contrastivism, knowledge attributions have the form "S knows that p, rather than q". In this paper I raise several problems for contrastivism: it lacks plausibility for many cases of knowledge, is too relaxed concerning the third relatum, and overlooks a further relativity of the knowledge relation.

Epistemic contrastivism is the view that knowledge is a ternary relation between a person, a proposition and a set of contrast propositions. This view is in tension with widely shared accounts of practical reasoning: be it the claim that knowledge of the premises is necessary for acceptable practical reasoning based on them or sufficient for the acceptability of the use of the premises in practical reasoning, or be it the claim that there is a looser connection between knowledge and practical reasoning. Given plausible assumptions, epistemic contrastivism implies that we should cut all links between knowledge and practical reasoning. However, the denial of any such link requires additional and independent arguments; if such arguments are lacking, then all the worse for epistemic contrastivism.

Philosophical Explorations, 2003

The concept of knowledge is a very ordinary one, in spite of its philosophical glory. Like the concepts of a thing or a person or an animal, or the concepts of cause, or of action, it is one that we use every day and would be lost without. We use it when we explain people's actions ("She visited you because she knew you would never visit her"), and when we say what testimony should be trusted ("She knows where he hid the loot: I'd pay attention to what she says and does"), and when we justify our own actions ("I looked in the fridge because I didn't know where else it might be.") This ordinariness makes philosophical skepticism threatening in an immediate way. But it combines uncomfortably with the high intellectual demands of some philosophical accounts of knowledge. There are reasons for these high demands arising from the function the concept has historically played in philosophy, associating it with the ideal of a rational intellectual agent. To reconcile the pulls from everyday life and the pulls from philosophy we need to understand the reasons why we have the concept: what are the core functions that it serves in our ordinary thinking? The claim of this paper is that the everyday functions of knowledge make most sense if we see knowledge as contrastive. That is, we can best understand how the concept does what it does by thinking in terms of a relation "a knows that p rather than q." There is always a contrast with an alternative. Contrastive interpretations of knowledge, and objections to them, have become fairly common in recent philosophy. The version being defended here is fairly mild in that there is no suggestion that we cannot think in terms of a simpler not explicitly contrastive relation "a knows that p." Some, for instance Schaff er (2005b) and Karjalainen and Morton (2003), have hinted that this stronger possibility may be right. But all that I am arguing now is that facts that are easily expressed in contrastive terms are vital to understanding why we need the concept of knowledge. In a piece that is in some ways a companion to this one (Morton 2010), I give a general survey of theories of contrastive knowledge and the diff erences between them. 1 BENEATH PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES: TRACKING Knowledge is a factive relation: it holds between people and actual facts. You cannot know something that is not so. Facts are problematic things,

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 88 (2014): 533-555.

Contrastivism about knowledge is the view that one does not just know some proposition. It is more adequate to say that one knows something rather than something else: I know that I am looking at a tree rather than a bush but I do not know that I am looking at a tree rather than a cleverly done tree imitation. Knowledge is a three-place relation between a subject, a proposition and a contrast set of propositions. There are several advantages of a contrastivist view but also certain problems with it.

We report and discuss the results of a series of experiments that address a contrast effect exhibited by folk judgments about knowledge ascriptions. The contrast effect, which was first reported by Schaffer and Knobe (2012), is an important aspect of our folk epistemology. However, there are competing theoretical accounts of it. We shed light on the various accounts by providing novel empirical data and theoretical considerations. Our key findings are, firstly, that belief ascriptions exhibit a similar contrast effect and, secondly, that the contrast effect is systematically sensitive to the content of what is in contrast. We argue that these data pose significant challenges to contrastivist accounts of the contrast effect. Furthermore, some of the data set provides, in conjunction with some non-empirical epistemological arguments, some limited evidence for what we call a focal bias account of the data (Gerken 2012, 2013). According to the focal bias account, the contrast effects arise at least in part because epistemically relevant facts are not always adequately processed when they are presented in certain ways.

Philosophy, 2021

In this paper I argue that there is a significant but often overlooked metaphysical distinction to be made between contextualism and contrastivism. The orthodox view is that contrastivism is merely a form of contextualism. This is a mistake. The contextualist view is incompatible with certain naturalist claims about the metaphysical nature of concepts within whichever domain is being investigated, while the contrastivist view is compatible with these claims. So, choosing one view over the other will involve choosing to affirm or deny a significant metaphysical claim. As such, a demarcation ought to be put in place between contextualism and contrastivism.

Social Epistemology, 2008

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.

Analysis, 2001

Social Epistemology, 2014

In this paper, I extend a contrastive account of perceptual knowledge to yield a contrastive account of self-knowledge. I also develop a contrastive account of the propositional attitudes and argue that this implies an anti-individualist account of propositional attitude concepts.