Conceptions of Knowledge

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.

Springer eBooks, 2018

Knowing the Facts: a Contrastivist Account of the Referential Opacity of Knowledge Attributions  'I know' is supposed to express a relation, not between me and the sense of a proposition (like 'I believe') but between me and a fact. (Wittgenstein, On Certainty, § 90) Ordinary speakers of English, but also philosophers acting in their professional capacity, often describe agents as 'knowing the facts of the matter', characterise the outcome of our epistemic dealings with the world as 'knowledge of facts', and refer to what has successfully been established by inquiry as the 'known facts'. By using these and other such phrases, they seem to imply that knowledge is, at least in some cases, a relation to facts. However, in epistemological circles the type of knowledge that is canonically ascribed to agents by issuing statements of the form 'S knows that p' goes under the label of 'propositional knowledge'. And, although the qualifier 'propositional' is sometimes used rather innocently as just a way to register the form of such knowledge attributions, the view that propositional knowledge is a relation to propositions is currently taken for granted by many epistemologists. This may be due to the circumstance that the idea that knowledge (from now on I will omit the qualifier 'propositional') is a species of belief has largely survived the demise of the traditional analysis that equates it to justified true belief. For belief is standardly assumed to be a propositional attitude, i.e., a relation to propositions; and if knowledge is just an especially valuable

I offer a critical treatment of the contrastivist response to the problem of radical scepticism. In particular, I argue that if contrastivism is understood along externalist lines then it is unnecessary; while if it is understood along internalist lines then it is intellectually dissatisfying. Moreover, I claim that a closer examination of the conditions under which it is appropriate to claim knowledge reveals that we can accommodate many of the intuitions appealed to by contrastivists without having to opt for this particular brand of epistemological revisionism.

Theoria, 2021

In this paper, I outline an account of the structure of perceptual justification that develops Wittgenstein's thought that the possibility of acquiring any degree of justification for our beliefs depends on placing certain propositions outside the route of empirical inquiry, turning them into the "hinges" of our rational evaluations. The proposal is akin to "moderate" accounts of the structure of perceptual justification; however, it conjoins Wittgenstein's insight with explanationist and contrastivist ideas and thus differs in important respects both from such accounts and from other versions of hinge epistemology. I maintain that the basic presuppositions of the epistemic practice of taking experience at face value are not totally refractory to evidential assessment, arguing that they can receive some degree of second-order empirical justification via inference to the best explanation. And I address the worry that the account may face the problem of "easy knowledge" by helping myself to the contrastivist view that empirical knowledge is best understood as a threeplace, contrastive relation between an agent, a proposition (or fact), and a contrast. This leads me to replace the usual closure principles for epistemic justification and knowledge with corresponding contrastive principles, filling in the final details of contrastive hinge epistemology.

Acta Analytica

In this paper, I defend epistemological contrastivism-the view that propositional knowledge is a three-place, contrastive relation between an agent, a proposition (or fact) and a contrast term-against two a priori arguments recently offered by Mikkel Gerken for the conclusion that intuitive judgements exhibiting a contrast effect on knowledge ascriptions are false positives. I show that the epistemic argument for false positives begs the question against contrastivism by assuming the independently implausible claim that knowledge of a contrastive proposition always presupposes knowledge of a related ordinary proposition. This claim is apparently also presupposed by the doxastic argument for false positives, the conclusion of which, I argue, is not only perfectly compatible with epistemological contrastivism but also heavily dependent on a (questionable) de dicto construal of the relevant knowledge ascriptions.

Two thoughts concerning knowledge have attracted a good deal of attention in the recent past. The first is the proposal that a contextualist semantics for “knowledge” is superior to the traditional invariantist semantics thereof. The second is the idea that knowledge is a natural kind. Might one comfortably espouse both or are these two ideas incompatible? This important question has received no attention except briefly and in passing by Alvin Goldman (2007: 17). Goldman comments as follows: A popular view in contemporary epistemology (with which I have much sympathy) is that knowledge has an important context-sensitive dimension. The exact standard for knowledge varies from context to context. Since it seems unlikely that natural kinds have contextually variable dimensions, this renders it dubious that any natural kind corresponds to one of our ordinary concepts of knowledge. This paper aims to investigate how best to build an argument out of Goldman’s remarks.

Philosophy Compass, 2019

The nature of scientific explanation is controversial. Some maintain that all scientific explanations have to be contrastive in nature. (Contrastivism) However, others argue that no scientific explanation is genuinely contrastive. (Non-contrastivism) In addition, a compatibilist view is developed. It is argued that the debate between contrastivism and non-contrastivism is merely a linguistic dispute rather than a genuine disagreement on the nature of scientific explanation. Scientific explanations are both contrastive and non-contrastive in some sense. (Compatibilism) This paper examines the debate between contrastivism and non-contrastivism in scientific explanation. It begins with a critical review of the arguments for contrastivism, non-contrastivism, and compatibilism, and concludes with some remarks on the prospect of the issue.

detail for contrastivism with respect to justified moral belief and moral knowledge. In this paper I raise three questions concerning this view. First, how would Sinnott-Armstrong account for constraints on admissible contrast classes? Second, how would he deal with notorious problems concerning relevant reference classes? And, finally, how can he account for basic features of moral agency? It turns out that the last problem is the most serious one for his account.