Causal claims are context sensitive. According to the old orthodoxy (Mackie 1974, Lewis 1986, inter alia), the context sensitivity of causal claims is all due to conversational pragmatics. According to the new contextualists (Hitchcock 1996, Woodward 2003, Maslen 2004, Menzies 2004, Schaffer 2005, and Hall ms), at least some of the context sensitivity of causal claims is semantic in nature. I want to discuss the prospects for causal contextualism, by asking why causal claims are context sensitive, what they are sensitive (...) to, and where they are sensitive to it. (shrink)

This paper defends strict invariantism against some philosophical and empirical data that have been taken to compromise it. The defence involves a combination of a priori philosophical arguments and empirically informed theorizing. The positive account of the data is an epistemic focal bias account that draws on cognitive psychology. It involves the assumption that, owing to limitations of the involved cognitive resources, intuitive judgments about knowledge ascriptions are generated by processing only a limited part of the available information—the part that (...) is in focus. According to the epistemic focal bias account, the intuitive judgments about knowledge ascriptions that constitute contrast effects amount to false positives, whereas the intuitive judgments that constitute salient alternatives effects amount to false negatives. I conclude by considering how the basic epistemic focal bias account may be developed further by reference to relevant alternatives theory in epistemology, pragmatics in the philosophy of language, and dual process theory in cognitive psychology. (shrink)

Contrastivism is the view that knowledge is a ternary relation between an agent, a content proposition, and a contrast, and it explains that a binary knowledge ascription sentence appears to be context-sensitive because different contexts can implicitly fill the contrast with different values. This view is purportedly supported by certain linguistic evidence. An objective of this paper is to argue that contrastivism is not empirically adequate, as there are examples that favor its contextualist cousin. Thereafter, I shall develop a contextualist (...) account for the relevant linguistic data. The account consists of a contextualist semantics and some rules of pragmatics. The two parts combined show that contrastivism is neither sufficient nor necessary as a satisfactory theory of knowledge ascriptions. (shrink)

How should one understand knowledge-wh ascriptions? That is, how should one understand claims such as ‘‘I know where the car is parked,’’ which feature an interrogative complement? The received view is that knowledge-wh reduces to knowledge that p, where p happens to be the answer to the question Q denoted by the wh-clause. I will argue that knowledge-wh includes the question—to know-wh is to know that p, as the answer to Q. I will then argue that knowledge-that includes a contextually (...) implicit question. I will conclude that knowledge is a question-relative state. Knowing is knowing the answer, and whether one knows the answer depends (in part) on the question. (shrink)

Single-premise epistemic closure is the principle that: if one is in an evidential position to know that P where P entails Q, then one is in an evidential position to know that Q. In this paper, I defend the viability of opposition to closure. A key task for such an opponent is to precisely formulate a restricted closure principle that remains true to the motivations for abandoning unrestricted closure but does not endorse particularly egregious instances of closure violation. I focus (...) on two brands of epistemic theory that naturally incorporate closure restrictions. The first type holds that the truth value of a knowledge ascription is relative to a relevant question. The second holds that the truth value of a knowledge ascription is relative to a relevant topic. For each approach, I offer a formalization of a leading theory from the literature and use this formalization to evaluate the theory’s adequacy in terms of a precise set of desiderata. I conclude that neither theory succeeds in meeting these desiderata, casting doubt on the viability of the underlying approaches. Finally, I offer a novel variant of the topic-sensitive approach that fares better. (shrink)

Contrastive epistemologists say knowledge displays the ternary relation “S knows p rather than q”. I argue that “S knows p rather than q” is often equivalent to “S knows p rather than not-p” and hence equivalent to “S knows p”. The result is that contrastive knowledge is often binary knowledge disguised.

Despite their importance in the history of philosophy and in particular in the work of Aristotle and Kant, mental capacities have been neglected in recent philosophical work. By contrast, the notion of a capacity is deeply entrenched in psychology and the brain sciences. Driven by the idea that a cognitive system has the capacity it does in virtue of its internal components and their organization, it is standard to appeal to capacities in cognitive psychology. The main benefit of invoking capacities (...) in an account of the mind is that it allows for an elegant counterfactual analysis of mental states: it allows us to analyze mental states on three distinct yet interrelated levels. A first level of analysis pertains to the function of mental capacities. A second level of analysis pertains to the mental capacities employed, irrespective of the context in which they are employed. A third level of analysis pertains to the mental capacities employed, taking into account the context in which they are employed. This paper develops an account of perceptual capacities. This account involves an analysis of their function, their individuation and possession conditions, the relation between perceptual capacities and their employment, as well as their informational and neural base conditions. (shrink)

Though the divide between reason-based and causal-explanatory approaches in psychiatry and psychopathology is old and deeply rooted, current trends involving multi-factorial explanatory models and evidence-based approaches to interpersonal psychotherapy, show that it has already been implicitly bridged. These trends require a philosophical reconsideration of how reasons can be causes. This paper contributes to that trajectory by arguing that Donald Davidson’s classic paradigm of 1963 is still a valid option.

In "Knowing the Answer" I argued that knowledge-wh is question-relative. For example, to know when the movie starts is to know the answer p to the question Q of when the movie starts. Berit Brogaard and Jesper Kallestrup have each responded with insightful critiques of my argument, and novel accounts of knowledge-wh. I am grateful to them both for continuing the discussion in so thoughtful a way.

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.

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. (shrink)

Knowledge ascriptions are contrast-sensitive. One natural explanation for this is that the knowledge relation is contrastive ( s knows that p rather than q ). But can the binary view of knowledge ( s knows that p ) explain contrast-sensitivity? I review some of the linguistic data supporting contrast-sensitivity, and critique the three main binary explanations for contrast-sensitivity. I conclude that the contrast-sensitivity of knowledge ascriptions shows that knowledge is a contrastive relation.

According to the safety principle, if one knows that p, then one’s belief in p could not easily have been false. In this paper, I pose a dilemma for safety theorists by asking the following question: In evaluating whether or not a belief is safe, must we only examine the error-possibilities of the same belief as formed in the actual world? If ‘yes’, safety meets a familiar objection regarding necessary truths and the objection also extends to contingent propositions. If ‘no’, (...) however, there is no necessity of safety for knowledge. It is argued that this dilemma poses a threat for a number of safety principles from the recent literature. In the end, I draw implications of my arguments for the debate between robust and anti-luck virtue epistemologies. The result is that anti-luck virtue epistemology suffers from the difficulty with the safety principle whereas the robust variant remains intact. (shrink)

Lin and Kelly :957–981, 2012) and Leitgeb :1338–1389, 2013, Philos Rev 123:131–171, 2014), offer similar solutions to the Lottery Paradox, defining acceptance rules which determine a rational agent’s beliefs in terms of broader features of her credal state than just her isolated credences in individual propositions. I express each proposal as a method for obtaining an ordering over a partition from a credence function, and then a belief set from the ordering. Although these proposals avoid the original Lottery Paradox, I (...) raise a diachronic case which illustrates that neither satisfies both Lin and Kelly’s constraint that the update on orderings track the update on credence functions, and the intuitive constraint that credence of at least 0.5 is necessary for rational belief. I conclude by suggesting that we reformulate these proposals in terms of orderings over entire algebras based on partitions rather than orderings just over the partitions themselves. Reformulating both rules in this way yields acceptance rules which avoid the Lottery Paradox while satisfying both the tracking and likeliness constraints. (shrink)

Theoria, Volume 87, Issue 5, Page 1222-1249, October 2021.

In this paper, I defend epistemological contrastivism—the view that propositional knowledge is a three-place, contrastive relation between an agent, a proposition 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 de dicto construal of the relevant knowledge ascriptions. (shrink)

Epistemic contextualism in the style of Lewis (1996) maintains that ascriptions of knowledge to a subject vary in truth with the alternatives that can be eliminated by the subject’s evidence in a context. Schaffer (2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2015), Schaffer and Knobe (2012), and Schaffer and Szabo ́ (2014) hold that the question under discussion or QUD always determines these alternatives in a context. This paper shows that the QUD does not perform such a role for "know" and uses this (...) result to draw a few lessons about the metasemantics of context- sensitivity. (shrink)

This introduction presents an overview of the articles in this special issue, within the framework of an argument for the conclusion that there are various roads leading from imagination to knowledge.

The Problem of Nearly Convergent Knowledge is an updated and stronger version of the Problem of Convergent Knowledge, which presents a problem for the traditional, binary view of knowledge in which knowledge is a two-place relation between a subject and the known proposition. The problem supports Knowledge Contrastivism, the view that knowledge is a three-place relation between a subject, the known proposition, and a proposition that disjoins the alternatives relevant to what the subject knows. For example, if knowledge is contrastive, (...) I do not simply know that the bird in front of me is a goldfinch; instead, I know that the bird in front of me is a goldfinch rather than a raven or eagle or falcon. There is, however, a binary view of knowledge that overcomes even the Problem of Nearly Convergent Knowledge. I will give this binary view, show that it is motivated by the same considerations that motivate Knowledge Contrastivism, and argue that it avoids problematic consequences for our epistemic lives that Knowledge Contrastivism cannot. (shrink)

The problem of closure for the traditional unstructured possible worlds model of attitudinal content is that it treats belief and other cognitive states as closed under entailment, despite apparent counterexamples showing that this is not a necessary property of such states. One solution to this problem, which has been proposed recently by several authors (Schaffer 2005; Yalcin 2018; Hoek forthcoming), is to restrict closure in an unstructured setting by treating propositional attitudes as question-sensitive. Here I argue that this line of (...) response is unsatisfying as it stands because the problem of closure is more general than is typically discussed. A version of the problem recurs for attitudes like wondering, entertaining, considering, and so on, which are directed at questions rather than propositions. For such questioning attitudes, the appeal to question-sensitivity is much less convincing as a solution to the problem of closure. (shrink)

Many epistemologists have been attracted to the view that knowledge-wh can be reduced to knowledge-that. An important challenge to this, presented by Jonathan Schaffer, is the problem of “convergent knowledge”: reductive accounts imply that any two knowledge-wh ascriptions with identical true answers to the questions embedded in their wh-clauses are materially equivalent, but according to Schaffer, there are counterexamples to this equivalence. Parallel to this, Schaffer has presented a very similar argument against binary accounts of knowledge, and thereby in favour (...) of his alternative contrastive account, relying on similar examples of apparently inequivalent knowledge ascriptions, which binary accounts treat as equivalent. In this article, I develop a unified diagnosis and solution to these problems for the reductive and binary accounts, based on a general theory of knowledge ascriptions that embed presuppositional expressions. All of Schaffer's apparent counterexamples embed presuppositional expressions, and once the effect of these is taken into account, it becomes apparent that the counterexamples depend on an illicit equivocation of contexts. Since epistemologists often rely on knowledge ascriptions that embed presuppositional expressions, the general theory of them presented here will have ramifications beyond defusing Schaffer's argument. (shrink)

Contrastivism about reasons is the view that ‘reason’ expresses a relation with an argument place for a set of alternatives. This is in opposition to a more traditional theory on which reasons are reasons for things simpliciter. I argue that contrastivism provides a solution to a puzzle involving reason claims that explicitly employ ‘rather than’. Contrastivism solves the puzzle by allowing that some fact might be a reason for an action out of one set of alternatives without being a reason (...) for that action out of a different set of alternatives. (shrink)

(Schroeder 2007) presents a puzzle about negative reason existentials—claims like ‘There's no reason to cry over spilled milk’. Some of these claims are intuitively true, but we also seem to be committed to the existence of the very reasons that are said not to exist. I argue that Schroeder's own pragmatic solution to this puzzle is unsatisfactory, and propose my own based on a contrastive account of reasons, according to which reasons are fundamentally reasons for one thing rather than another, (...) instead of reasons for things simpliciter, as has been traditionally held. (shrink)

Contrastivism about some concept says that the concept is relativized to sets of alternatives. Relative to some alternatives, the concept may apply, but relative to others, it may not. This article explores contrastivism about the central normative concepts of reasons and ought. Contrastivism about reasons says that a consideration may be a reason for an action A rather than one alternative, B, but may not be a reason for A rather than some other alternative, C. Likewise, contrastivism about ought says (...) that it might be that you ought to perform action A rather than action B, while it is not the case that you ought to perform A rather than some other alternative, C. It explores the shape and motivations for, and the relationship between, these contrastivist theories. (shrink)

A plausible constraint on normative reasons to act is that it must make sense to use them as premises in deliberation. I argue that a central sort of deliberation – what Bratman calls partial planning – is question-directed: it is over, and aims to resolve, deliberative questions. Whether it makes sense to use some consideration as a premise in deliberation in a case of partial planning can vary with the deliberative question at issue. I argue that the best explanation for (...) this is that reasons are contrastive or relativized to deliberative questions. (shrink)

Does what you know depend on what is at stake for you? That is, is the knowledge relation sensitive to the subject’s practical interests? Subject sensitive invariantists (Fantl and McGrath, 2002; Hawthorne, 2004, ch. 4; Stanley, forthcoming) say that the answer is yes. They claim to capture the contextualist data without the shifty semantics. I will argue that the answer is no. The knowledge relation is sensitive to what is in question for the attributor, rather than what is at stake (...) for the subject. There is no substitute for the contextualist semantics. (shrink)

Is the relation between properties and the causal powers they confer necessary, or contingent? Necessary, says Sydney Shoemaker, on pain of skepticism about the properties. Contingent, says David Lewis, swallowing the skeptical conclusion. I shall argue that Lewis is right about the metaphysics, but that Shoemaker and Lewis are wrong about the epistemology. Properties have intrinsic natures (quiddities), which we can know.

How must knowledge be formed, if made in the image of assertion? That is, given that knowledge plays the normative role of governing what one may assert, what can be inferred about the structure of the knowledge relation from this role? I will argue that what one may assert is sensitive to the question under discussion, and conclude that what one knows must be relative to a question. In short, knowledge in the image of assertion is question-relative knowledge.

Contextualism treats ‘knows’ as an indexical that denotes different epistemic properties in different contexts. Contrastivism treats ‘knows’ as denoting a ternary relation with a slot for a contrast proposition. I will argue that contrastivism resolves the main philosophical problems of contextualism, by employing a better linguistic model. Contextualist insights are best understood by contrastivist theory.

Knowledge ascriptions seem context sensitive. Yet it is widely thought that epistemic contextualism does not have a plausible semantic implementation. We aim to overcome this concern by articulating and defending an explicit contextualist semantics for ‘know,’ which integrates a fairly orthodox contextualist conception of knowledge as the elimination of the relevant alternatives, with a fairly orthodox “Amherst” semantics for A-quantification over a contextually variable domain of situations. Whatever problems epistemic contextualism might face, lack of an orthodox semantic implementation is not (...) among them. (shrink)

Suppose that Ann says, “Keith knows that the bank will be open tomorrow.” Her audience may well agree. Her knowledge ascription may seem true. But now suppose that Ben—in a different context—also says “Keith knows that the bank will be open tomorrow.” His audience may well disagree. His knowledge ascription may seem false. Indeed, a number of philosophers have claimed that people’s intuitions about knowledge ascriptions are context sensitive, in the sense that the very same knowledge ascription can seem true (...) in one conversational context but false in another. This purported fact about people’s intuitions serves as one of the main pieces of evidence for epistemic contextualism. (shrink)

How should the contrastivist formulate closure? That is, given that knowledge is a ternary contrastive state Kspq (s knows that p rather than q), how does this state extend under entailment? In what follows, I will identify adequacy conditions for closure, criticize the extant invariantist and contextualist closure schemas, and provide a contrastive schema based on the idea of extending answers. I will conclude that only the contrastivist can adequately formulate closure.

Causation is widely assumed to be a binary relation: c causes e. I will argue that causation is a quaternary, contrastive relation: c rather than C* causes e rather than E*, where C* and E* are nonempty sets of contrast events. Or at least, I will argue that treating causation as contrastive helps resolve some paradoxes.

In this paper, I draw on a recent account of perceptual knowledge according to which knowledge is contrastive. I extend the contrastive account of perceptual knowledge to yield a contrastive account of self-knowledge. Along the way, I develop a contrastive account of the propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, regrets and so on) and suggest that a contrastive account of the propositional attitudes implies an anti-individualist account of propositional attitude concepts (the concepts of belief, desire, regret, and so on).

Many epistemologists treat knowledge as a binary relation that holds between a subject and a proposition. The contrastive account of knowledge developed by Jonathan Schaffer maintains that knowledge is a ternary, contrastive relation that holds between a subject, a proposition, and a set of contextually salient alternative propositions the subject’s evidence must eliminate. For the contrastivist, it is never simply the case that S knows that p; in every case of knowledge S knows that p rather than q. This paper (...) offers a counterexample to the contrastive account of knowledge. Part 1 summarizes the contrastive theory developed by Schaffer in a series of recent papers. Part 2 presents an example from a class of cases characterized by compatibility between the proposition p and each of the alternative propositions that occupy q. In such cases the alternative propositions that partially constitute the ternary contrastive relation play no role in the acquisition of knowledge. Part 3 considers and rejects potential responses to the counterexample. The paper concludes that the contrastive theory is not a general account of knowledge. (shrink)

Knowledge is widely thought to entail belief. But Radford has claimed to offer a counterexample: the case of the unconfident examinee. And Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel have claimed empirical vindication of Radford. We argue, in defense of orthodoxy, that the unconfident examinee does indeed have belief, in the epistemically relevant sense of dispositional belief. We buttress this with empirical results showing that when the dispositional conception of belief is specifically elicited, people’s intuitions then conform with the view that knowledge entails (dispositional) (...) belief. (shrink)

Pure virtue epistemology faces the fake barn challenge. This paper explains how it can be met. Thus, it is argued that the thought experiment contains a hidden ambiguity concerning the visual ability typically ascribed to, or denied, fake barn subjects. Disambiguation shows fake barn subjects to have limited knowledge of the target proposition. This accords with a pure virtue-theoretic conception of knowledge that predicts and explains all the intuitions elicited by the thought experiment. As a result, the relationship between knowledge, (...) luck and ability is illuminated, and our epistemological theorizing improved. (shrink)

Dretske is a “conciliatory skeptic” on self-knowledge. Take some subject S such that S thinks that P and S knows that she has thoughts. Dretske’s theory can be put as follows: S has a privileged way of knowing what she thinks, but she has no privileged way of knowing that she thinks it. There is much to be said on behalf of conciliatory skepticism and Dretske’s defense of it. We aim to show, however, that Dretske’s defense fails, in that if (...) his defense of CS’s skeptical half succeeds, then his defense of CS’s conciliatory half fails. We then suggest a potential way forward. We suggest in particular that the correct way of being a Dretskean conciliatory skeptic is to deny that S has a privileged way of knowing about her thoughts, but to grant that she is nonetheless an authority on her thoughts. (shrink)

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.

This paper examines the relationship between perceptual knowledge and discrimination in the light of the so-called ‘relevant alternatives’ intuition. It begins by outlining an intuitive relevant alternatives account of perceptual knowledge which incorporates the insight that there is a close connection between perceptual knowledge and the possession of relevant discriminatory abilities. It is argued, however, that in order to resolve certain problems that face this view, it is essential to recognise an important distinction between favouring and discriminating epistemic support that (...) is often overlooked in the literature. This distinction complicates the story regarding how an alternative becomes relevant, and in doing so weakens the connection between perceptual knowledge and discrimination. The theory that results, however—what I term a ‘two-tiered’ relevant alternatives theory of perceptual knowledge—accommodates many of our intuitions about perceptual knowledge and so avoids the revisionism of some recent proposals in the epistemological literature. (shrink)

It is argued that it is beneficial to view the debate regarding radical scepticism through the lens of epistemic value. In particular, it is claimed that we should regard radical scepticism as aiming to deprive us of an epistemic standing that is of special value to us, and that this methodological constraint on our dealings with radical scepticism potentially has important ramifications for how we assess the success of an anti-sceptical strategy.

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. (shrink)

In this paper, I do three things. First, I offer an overview of an anti- luck epistemology, as set out in my book, Epistemic Luck. Second, I attempt to meet some of the main criticisms that one might level against the key theses that I propose in this work. And finally, third, I sketch some of the ways in which the strategy of anti- luck epistemology can be developed in new directions.

Do you know who you are? If the question seems unclear, it might owe to the notion of ‘knowing-wh’ (knowing-who, knowing-what, knowing-when, etc.). Such knowledge contrasts with ‘knowing-that’, the more familiar topic of epistemologists. But these days, knowing-wh is receiving more attention than ever, and here we will survey three current debates on the nature of knowing-wh. These debates concern, respectively, (1) whether all knowing-wh is reducible to knowing-that (‘generalized intellectualism’), (2) whether all knowing-wh is relativized to a contrast proposition (...) (‘contrastivism about knowing-wh’), and (3) whether the context-sensitivity of knowing-wh is a semantic or purely pragmatic phenomenon (‘contextualism vs. invariantism about knowing-wh’). (shrink)

Your evidence constrains your rational degrees of confidence both locally and globally. On the one hand, particular bits of evidence can boost or diminish your rational degree of confidence in various hypotheses, relative to your background information. On the other hand, epistemic rationality requires that, for any hypothesis h, your confidence in h is proportional to the support that h receives from your total evidence. Why is it that your evidence has these two epistemic powers? I argue that various proposed (...) accounts of what it is for something to be an element of your evidence set cannot answer this question. I then propose an alternative account of what it is for something to be an element of your evidence set. 1 Introduction 2 The elements of one's evidence set are propositions 3 Which kinds of propositions are in one's evidence set? 3.1 Doxastic accounts of evidence 3.2 Non-doxastic accounts of evidence 4 Elaborating and defending the LIE CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Why do our intuitive knowledge ascriptions shift when a subject's practical interests are mentioned? Many efforts to answer this question have focused on empirical linguistic evidence for context sensitivity in knowledge claims, but the empirical psychology of belief formation and attribution also merits attention. The present paper examines a major psychological factor (called ?need-for-closure?) relevant to ascriptions involving practical interests. Need-for-closure plays an important role in determining whether one has a settled belief; it also influences the accuracy of one's cognition. (...) Given these effects, it is a mistake to assume that high- and low-stakes subjects provided with the same initial evidence are perceived to enjoy belief formation that is the same as far as truth-conducive factors are concerned. This mistaken assumption has underpinned contextualist and interest-relative invariantist treatments of cases in which contrasting knowledge ascriptions are elicited by descriptions of subjects with the same initial information and different stakes. The paper argues that intellectualist invariantism can easily accommodate such cases. (shrink)