On “ from Contextualism to Contrastivism ”

Jonathan Schaffer is sympathetic to the contextualist approach to epistemology, broadly construed, but thinks that it hasn’t got the account of the verb “knows” quite right. Contextualists are on to something, but their view needs to be reformulated to give a correct account of the way we talk about knowledge, and (he argues) the reformulated view can do a better job of developing and defending the contextualist strategy for responding to skepticism. The structure of his paper is clear and straightforward: he states three theses that he takes to define contextualism about knowledge, and three parallel but contrasting theses that he uses to define contrastivism, his alternative to contextualism. He then argues that each of his three theses is superior to its counterpart. One issue is whether there really a disagreement between the two doctrines; as Schaffer notes, some Contextualists have suggested that his contrastivism is simply a version of contextualism – one way of implementing the general account. So part of the burden of the argument of the paper is to defend the claim that the two accounts really are in conflict. If there is a conflict between the accounts, it is a conflict between general kinds of analysis, rather than between two specific analyses, since the contrast is made at a high level of abstraction. As Schaffer emphasizes, his contrasting sets of theses are designed to leave both of the doctrines he is comparing neutral about the details of the analysis of knowledge. But even at this very general level, he argues, there is a significant difference between contextualism and contrastivism. This is a rich paper, and there is too much going on in it to talk about it all. I am going to start with the question whether there really is a disagreement between the two doctrines, and if there is, what kind of disagreement it is. I will then spend most of my time on