Undermining the case for contrastivism

Social Epistemology 22 (3):289 – 304 (2008)
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Abstract

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

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Ram Neta
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Citations of this work

Knowledge and Presuppositions.Michael Blome-Tillmann - 2009 - Mind 118 (470):241 - 294.
The Contrast-sensitivity of Knowledge Ascriptions.Jonathan Schaffer - 2008 - Social Epistemology 22 (3):235-245.
Contrastive Self-knowledge.Sarah Sawyer - 2014 - Social Epistemology 28 (2):139-152.
Solving the Problem of Nearly Convergent Knowledge.Chris Tweedt - 2018 - Social Epistemology 32 (4):219-227.

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References found in this work

Knowledge and its limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Elusive knowledge.David Lewis - 1996 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (4):549 – 567.
Contextualism and knowledge attributions.Keith DeRose - 1992 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (4):913-929.
From contextualism to contrastivism.Jonathan Schaffer - 2004 - Philosophical Studies 119 (1-2):73-104.
Contrastive knowledge.Jonathan Schaffer - 2005 - In Tamar Szabó Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology. Oxford University Press. pp. 235.

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