Abstract
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.
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Notes
For the sake of simplicity, I will often express myself here as if there is only one contrast proposition. Nothing of any substance depends on this simplification.
There are other possible views but they lack plausibility and need not be discussed here.
I am putting aside two types of special cases: cases where the target proposition p has no contrast q such that the subject knows that p rather than q, and cases where the target proposition p has no contrast q such that the subject does not know that p rather than q.
Absoluteness in this sense is compatible with contrastivity. What matters is the uniqueness and invariance (with contrast sets) of the answer to the question “What is the right way to think about this and what should I do?”.
Sure, given one standard of cleanliness Fred might count as having removed all of the liquid while given another standard of cleanliness he might not count as such. However, this is not the issue here. The problem above remains even for fixed standards of cleanliness.
See also Jordan (2014) who argues that virtue-ethical motivations are not compatible with contrastivism about practical reasons.
Finally, there might be an infinite number of contrast propositions to consider or, at least, an indefinite number. How should we, under such conditions, ever get any grip on what the practically relevant alternative could be?
See for a similar problem about moral justification my 2008.
I won’t explain this further here in order to avoid repetitions—What if one said that practical reasoning based on a given proposition p is better (worse) the more (fewer) contrast propositions q there are such that the subject knows p, rather than q (thanks to a referee for this idea)? There are difficult questions about how to count contrast propositions and how to weigh their relative importance. Apart from that, this is not quite the proposal under discussion, namely that knowledge (construed contrastively or not) of a proposition improves the quality of practical reasoning based on it; this is rather the idea that “more knowledge” improves the quality of practical reasoning. However, this “additional” knowledge does not affect whether the subject knows the relevant target proposition p: If yes, then the additional knowledge won’t improve her situation with respect to knowledge of p; if not, then the additional knowledge won’t help her with respect to knowledge of p. To be sure: It might well be good to know more rather than less but this point seems irrelevant to the topic here.
This view is much stronger than the (quite popular) mere denial of the necessity claim or the sufficiency claim.
Thanks to a referee for pressing me here and coming up with this idea.
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Baumann, P. Epistemic Contrastivism, Knowledge and Practical Reasoning. Erkenn 81, 59–68 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-015-9728-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-015-9728-z