TY - JOUR
T1 - Reducing Contrastive Knowledge
AU - u, Stanford
N1 - Funding Information:
I would like to thank Johan van Benthem, Ray Briggs, Ivano Ciardelli, Krista Lawlor, Lisa Modifica, Jonathan Schaffer and and two anonymous referees of this journal for many helpful comments, suggestions and corrections on earlier versions of this article.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, Springer Nature B.V.
PY - 2021/12
Y1 - 2021/12
N2 - According to one form of epistemic contrastivism, due to Jonathan Schaffer, knowledge is not a binary relation between an agent and a proposition, but a ternary relation between an agent, a proposition, and a context-basing question. In a slogan: to know is to know the answer to a question. I argue, first, that Schaffer-style epistemic contrastivism can be semantically represented in inquisitive dynamic epistemic logic, a recent implementation of inquisitive semantics in the framework of dynamic epistemic logic; second, that within inquisitive dynamic epistemic logic, the contrastive ternary knowledge operator is reducible to the standard binary one. The reduction shows, I argue, that Schaffer’s argument in favor of contrastivism is compatible with a binary picture of knowledge. This undercuts the force of the argument in favor of contrastivism.
AB - According to one form of epistemic contrastivism, due to Jonathan Schaffer, knowledge is not a binary relation between an agent and a proposition, but a ternary relation between an agent, a proposition, and a context-basing question. In a slogan: to know is to know the answer to a question. I argue, first, that Schaffer-style epistemic contrastivism can be semantically represented in inquisitive dynamic epistemic logic, a recent implementation of inquisitive semantics in the framework of dynamic epistemic logic; second, that within inquisitive dynamic epistemic logic, the contrastive ternary knowledge operator is reducible to the standard binary one. The reduction shows, I argue, that Schaffer’s argument in favor of contrastivism is compatible with a binary picture of knowledge. This undercuts the force of the argument in favor of contrastivism.
KW - Epistemic Contrastivism
KW - Ternary Relation
KW - Epistemic Logic
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85074840740&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s10670-019-00169-4
DO - 10.1007/s10670-019-00169-4
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85074840740
SN - 0165-0106
VL - 86
SP - 1547
EP - 1565
JO - Erkenntnis
JF - Erkenntnis
IS - 6
ER -