A Contrastivist Response to Gerken’s Arguments for False Positives

Abstract

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