Problems for contrastive closure: resolved and regained

Philosophical Studies 163 (3):577-590 (2013)
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Abstract

The standard contextualist solution to the skeptical paradox is intended to provide a way to retain epistemic closure while avoiding the excessive modesty of radical skepticism and the immodesty of Moorean dogmatism. However, contextualism’s opponents charge that its solution suffers from epistemic immodesty comparable to Moorean dogmatism. According to the standard contextualist solution, all contexts where an agent knows some ordinary proposition to be true are contexts where she also knows that the skeptical hypotheses are false. It has been hoped that contrastivist theories of knowledge can mirror the contextualist solution while avoiding this epistemic immodesty. I review the main problems for contrastive closure and argue that none of the arguments currently in the literature pose an insurmountable problem for the contrastivist solution. However, I argue that contrastivist theories of knowledge, like their contextualist rivals, are indeed committed to epistemic immodesty

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Michael Hughes
University of Connecticut

Citations of this work

Epistemic Contrastivism.Peter Baumann - 2017 - Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Contrastive Hinge Epistemology.Giorgio Volpe - 2021 - Theoria 87 (5):1222-1249.
From contrastivism back to contextualism.Da Fan - 2023 - Synthese 201 (1):1-23.
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References found in this work

From contextualism to contrastivism.Jonathan Schaffer - 2004 - Philosophical Studies 119 (1-2):73-104.
Closure, Contrast, and Answer.Jonathan Schaffer - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 133 (2):233-255.
A contrastivist manifesto.Walter Sinnott-Armstrong - 2008 - Social Epistemology 22 (3):257 – 270.
Externalism and Modest Contextualism.Fred Dretske - 2004 - Erkenntnis 61 (2-3):173-186.

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