Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-1-2016

Published In

Erkenntnis

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.

Keywords

contrast proposition, relevant alternative theory, practical reasoning, knowledge attribution, sufficiency claim, relevance threshold, ternary relation, target proposition, necessity claim, subject-sensitive invariantism, rational permissibility, maimin principle, relevant premise, epistemic relativism, justify moral belief

Comments

This work is a preprint freely available courtesy of the author and Springer Verlag.

The final publication version can be freely accessed courtesy of Springer Nature's SharedIt service.

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