Contrastivism, RelevanceContextualism, andMeta-Skepticism

mark timmons

University of Arizona

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, in his excellent new book, defends what he

calls ‘moderate Pyrrhonian skepticism.’ It is moderate because, with

regard to qualified epistemic judgments about beliefs, the view allows

that affirmative epistemic judgments involving modest contrast classes

can be true. It is a version of Pyrrhonian, as opposed to Academic

skepticism, because, with respect to affirmative unqualified epistemic

judgments, the Pyrrhonian refuses to take a stand on whether such

judgments are true or false, while the Academic claims that they are all

false. In defending Pyrrhonianism, Sinnott-Armstrong criticizes episte-

mological invariantism and contextualism.1

In what follows, I will comment on Sinnott-Armstrong’s challenges

to contextualism with the modest aim of making a few tentative sugges-

tions about how a contextualist might begin to respond to these

challenges.

1. Relevance Contextualism and Meta-Skepticism

Couched within Sinnott-Armstrong’s contrastivist framework, unquali-

fied epistemic judgments have the form:

UEJ S is justified in believing proposition, p, out of the relevant

contrast class.

1 As they are being used here, these terms refer to a distinction that is orthogonal to

recent semantic disputes between so-called semantic contextualists (who claim that

in different contexts of use, epistemic sentences of a particular form [e.g., ‘S knows

that p’] express different propositions) and so-called semantic invariantists who deny

this.

802 MARK TIMMONS

Philosophy and Phenomenological ResearchVol. LXXVII No. 3, November 2008� 2008 International Phenomenological Society

Invariantists (whether modest or extreme) claim that one sort of

contrast class is always relevant, while contextualists hold that in some

contexts a modest contrast class is relevant, but in others an extreme

contrast class is relevant.

The basis of Sinnott-Armstrong’s Pyrrhonism is his claim that even if

(in a context) there is some one really relevant contrast class, no one

knows how to specify which contrast class that is. Hence, his Pyrrhonian

skepticism: taking no stand on whether unqualified epistemic judgments

are true, and so neither affirming nor denying invariantism, contextual-

ism, or Academic skepticism.

2. Challenges

Sinnott-Armstrong raises two general types of challenge to contextual-

ism: the specification challenge and the cross-contexts challenge. Let us

take a closer look at these challenges, with an eye out for the specific

requirements Sinnott-Armstrong imposes for meeting them.

A. The Specification Challenge

Specify in a non-arbitrary manner which, from among many possibly

relevant contrast classes, is the ‘really’ relevant contrast class. There are

two main versions of this challenge. First, since a central idea in con-

textualism is that there are (or can be) contexts in which extreme con-

trast classes are not relevant, it is incumbent on the contextualist to

specify the conditions under which skeptical challenges are and are not

relevant. Call this the identity challenge, since it has to do with the

identities of everyday, ordinary contexts (in which a modest contrast

class is relevant) as compared with skeptical contexts (in which an

extreme contrast class is relevant). Second, even in non-skeptical, every-

day contexts, the contextualist needs to be able to specify, from among

the many possible distinct modest contrast classes, which of them is the

really relevant contrast class. Call this the determinacy challenge. Let us

take a closer look at each of these challenges.

i. Identity: The problem here, according to Sinnott-Armstrong, is

that ‘‘there is no way to formulate plausible rules about which contrast

classes are relevant in which contexts’’ (pp. 98–9). Sinnott-Armstrong is

critical of David Lewis’s attempt to specify rules, including, in particu-

lar Lewis’s rule of attention,2 according to which if one is not ignoring

a skeptical, far-fetched alternative, but attending to it, then it is rele-

vant. But against this, Sinnott-Armstrong notes that in the context of a

jury trial, for instance, if the defense attorney mentions a demon

2 See Lewis 1996: 559.

BOOK SYMPOSIUM 803

scenario as some sort of ploy, no matter how silly in the context of the

trial, it becomes (by Lewis’s rule) relevant and thus must be ruled out

in order for members of the jury to reach a guilty verdict in the case at

hand. Sinnott-Armstrong says that members of the jury may properly

ignore the scenario; it does not become relevant just because it is men-

tioned. Focusing, then, on the question of when skeptical scenarios are

relevant, the identity challenge claims that contextualists have no way

to distinguish (non-arbitrarily) ordinary, non-skeptical contexts from

skeptical ones (and correspondingly, they have no way to explain when

skeptical contrast classes are and are not relevant). Moreover, Sinnott-

Armstrong’s specific way of pressing this objection seems to assume

that the only way for the contextualist to answer the challenge is to

formulate plausible rules whose application will (by and large) make

the distinction in question. Call this the rule requirement.

ii. Determinacy: While the identity challenge has to do with distin-

guishing everyday from skeptical contexts, the determinacy challenge is

more general and can be raised in connection with the range of possible

modest contrast classes; a modest contrast class being described as

one that ‘‘meets the usual standards.’’ The problem, says Sinnott-

Armstrong, is that the description in question hardly picks out a deter-

minate set. In his example (p. 99) where a waiter walks up to a table of

customers, pronounces his name, thereby resulting in the customers

justifiedly coming to believe his name is ‘Jeff,’ Sinnott-Armstrong notes

that neither the customers nor the contextualist can specify the mem-

bers of the contrast class.

Furthermore, in addition to class size, there are other ways in which

the contrast class lacks (or seems to lack) determinacy. Does the rele-

vant contrast class include all names or just male names? What about

a name like ‘Geoff’ that is pronounced the same but spelled differently

than the waiter’s name? Is it in the modest contrast class? If it is, then

the customer can’t be justified in his belief, since just hearing the

waiter pronounce his name is not enough to rule out his name being

‘Geoff.’

There seem to be two specific requirements operative here. First, that

the contextualist must be able to articulate the members of the relevant

contrast class (articulation requirement). Second, that in order to meet

this challenge, there must be some precise contrast class that is the really

relevant one in whatever context is in question (precision requirement).

B. The Cross-contexts Challenge

This challenge concerns third person claims (‘‘he is justified’’) when

more than one context appears to be relevant to the epistemic judgment.

804 MARK TIMMONS

Suppose a philosopher teaching a course about the problem of otherminds asks a student whether a certain doctor in a hospital is justifiedin believing that a certain patient is in pain. These three people …play different roles: the philosopher assesses the student’s judgment

about whether the doctor’s belief is justified. Now, if a larger extremecontrast class is relevant in the philosopher’s context, then contextual-ists have no non-arbitrary way of telling which context or contrast

class determines how the philosophy student should assess the doc-tor’s belief. The only way to handle such cross-context judgments isto say that the doctor is justified out of one contrast class but not

another and then refuse to pick one contrast class as the relevant oneor to say whether the doctor is justified (without qualification).(p. 102–3)

Apparently, two perspectives (contexts) compete for fixing the relevant

contrast class: the context of the subject (doctor) and the context of the

attributor (philosophy of mind student) and we have no way to deter-

mine which perspective (attributor or subject) is the relevant one. But,

according to this objection, the contextualist view requires that only

one of them is relevant. Call this the single relevant perspective

requirement.

3. Strategies

Before considering how a contextualist might respond, let us first clar-

ify the dialectical state of play. We may distinguish generic from spe-

cific versions of these challenges. It seems entirely fitting to expect

contextualists to say something illuminating about how contexts are

specified and how to make sense of cross-context judgments. These are

generic worries about contextualism. What I’m calling Sinnott-

Armstrong’s specific versions of these challenges involve three main

elements: (1) contrastivism, (2) the analysis of UEJs, and (3) the

various specific requirements mentioned above.

In light of 1–3, there are various strategies for responding. The

most concessive would accept all three elements, but argue that the

contextualist can respond to Sinnott-Armstrong’s specific challenges.

The least concessive option would reject all three elements and then

explain how the contextualist can meet if not dismiss the generic

challenges. There are options in between the extremes, including my

own which will be to grant contrastivism, and the analysis of UEJs

(just for strategic purposes), and then with respect to all but one of

the specific challenges deny that the contextualist must meet the spe-

cific associated demands explained above. With respect to the remain-

ing objection, I will suggest how the contextualist might meet the

challenge head on.

BOOK SYMPOSIUM 805

4. Responses

Rules: In ethics, it is common to construe moral rules and principles as

committed to atomism about reasons: the morally relevant features

mentioned in such rules are fixed in the sense that they are always

morally relevant (when instantiated) and always carry the same pro or

con valence. Atomism is opposed by reasons holism, according to

which, whether a feature is morally relevant and carries a particular

valence in some concrete circumstance depends on what other features

are present in those circumstances. Reasons holism in ethics is associ-

ated with particularism—the view that rejects moral rules and princi-

ples. This same set of distinctions can be applied to questions about

the relevance of considerations that bear on epistemic context, call

them context-setting features.

Lewis’s rule of attention seemingly purports to mention a context-

setting feature that operates atomistically, but I agree with Sinnott-

Armstrong that it doesn’t operate this way: the fact that a wild

skeptical scenario has merely been mentioned in a jury trial does not

automatically make an extreme contrast class the relevant one.3 Of

course, this is only one possible context-setting rule. It is open to the

contextualist to propose other rules that do mention features that are

fixed (invariant) in their context-setting relevance. But even if there are

no such rules to be found, the contextualist can join the holist ⁄particu-larist ranks about how reasons (in general) operate. Indeed, given the

subtlety of epistemic justification, I think the contextualist should not

expect there to be invariant context-setting features. Rather, whether

the context is modest or extreme will likely depend on considerations

that operate holistically. So my first recommendation to the contextual-

ist is to go particularist with respect to context-setting considerations.

Articulability: When the waiter in Sinnott-Armstrong’s example

announces his name, there are a great many names that are incompatible

with what the waiter says. Many names (including ‘River’ and ‘Moon

Unit’) would probably never occur to a believer or to an epistemologist

were either of them to consider the issue of contrasting names. But I

don’t see why this is supposed to be a problem for contrastivists, whether

contextualist or not. Isn’t it enough that the believer has evidence that

does rule out names like ‘River,’ ‘Moon Unit,’ and a great many others?

Regarding the issue of articulability, Henderson and Horgan (2000)

argue persuasively that it would be too demanding psychologically (in

light of the ‘frame problem’ in cognitive science) to require that sub-

jects who justifiedly believe some proposition p, have access to all of

3 For some discussion of Lewis’s rule and the issue of context-setting see Hawthorne

2004: 61–8.

806 MARK TIMMONS

the evidential grounds they have for p and that play a role in their

coming (or continuing) to believe p. If, in justifiedly holding a belief,

one need not have access to (and hence need not be able to articulate)

all of one’s grounds for that belief, then why suppose that one must be

able to fully articulate the contrasting propositions that one’s grounds

rule out? So my second recommendation for the contextualist is to sim-

ply deny that the demand in question is one that needs to be met by

any theory of epistemic justification.

Precision: The concept of epistemic justification is vague. And argu-

ably this vagueness will be reflected in contrast classes. As Sinnott-

Armstrong points out, there seem to be borderline alternatives; alterna-

tives that are neither clearly in the contrast class, nor are they clearly

outside the contrast class. One approach to the issue of vagueness is

supervaluationism which, applied to the issue at hand, would claim that

a contrary proposition is a member of the relevant contrast class if it is a

member of all allowable contrast class precisifications. Going super-

valuationist avoids the determinacy requirement, but it takes on the

burden of explaining what counts as an allowable precisification. On

page 101, Sinnott-Armstrong dismisses a supervaluationist approach by

posing a dilemma. Either what counts as an allowable contrast class will

involve reference to any purpose at all (sticking with the restaurant

example) a customer in his example might have (in which case the con-

trast class will be intuitively too wide ruling out being justified in believ-

ing the waiter’s name is ‘Jeff’), or reference will have to be to all

purposes, in which case the contrast class will be excessively narrow,

thus making justification in the proposition in question too easy. This

strikes me as a false dilemma; however, going through the horns requires

that the contextualist say something about ‘allowable’ contrast classes.

I don’t have a full response to this challenge, but I think as a start,

the contextualist will want to appeal to such factors as these: (a) Pur-

poses of inquiry: an important part of the contextualist’s story concerns

the point or purpose of some particular form of inquiry. The trail jury

is supposed to reach a verdict regarding the guilt or innocence of the

accused. Given the norms that govern such proceedings, wild, skeptical

alternatives are not relevant in this context. (b) Information (including

background information) that the believer ought to be aware of and make

use of in the context. Let me explain.

In the waiter case, if one’s purpose is to know how to spell the

waiter’s name (or what his name is), ‘Geoff’ is relevant. If, one

the other hand, one’s purpose is just to be able to call the waiter to

the table, and if, for instance, the name ‘Geoff’ is rare (given the time

or location of the restaurant), then one’s evidence need not rule out

‘Geoff’ in order to be justified in believing his name is ‘Jeff.’ Of

BOOK SYMPOSIUM 807

course, different customers at the same table may have different

interests ⁄purposes. But (unlike Sinnott-Armstrong) I don’t find it odd

to say that some customers are justified in believing his name is ‘Jeff,’

while others are not. On the contextualist’s picture, justification is

sensitive to purposes—that’s a large part of the main idea. In these

scenarios, one’s purposes come to the fore in narrowing the range of

allowable contrast classes. To what I’ve just said, Sinnott-Armstrong

may reply (p. 100 n.24), that his case concerns the belief that the

waiter’s name is ‘Jeff,’ not that his name is spelled ‘J-e-f-f’ or pro-

nounced like ‘Jeff.’ But here is where background information plays

an important role. When I was growing up many years ago in the

Southwest very few people were named ‘Geoff’—at least at that time

around there. In that context, I think it is intuitively plausible to

claim that a customer would be justified in believing the waiter’s

name is ‘Jeff’—‘Geoff’ was so uncommon at that time around there,

that it is arguably not in the relevant contrast class. Of course, were

someone at the table to bring up the fact that a bunch of Geoffs just

moved to town, then it would be part of relevant background infor-

mation bearing on one’s belief and ‘Geoff’ would be a member of the

relevant contrast class (a member of all allowable precisifications of

contrast classes regarding names).

My third recommendation, then, is that the contextualist should

deny the precision requirement, but say more about contexts and rele-

vant alternatives, perhaps pursuing a supervaluationist story that would

avoid Sinnott-Armstrong’s dilemma.

Single Relevant Perspective: I think the contextualist ought to meet

this challenge head-on by taking a stand and emphasizing the pre-

sumptive believer-focused aspect of epistemic appraisal. This would

mean that attributions (or denials) of justification regarding a person’s

believing p on some occasion would make the believer’s context pre-

sumptively salient. After all, when we ask whether someone is justified

in holding some belief, our focus is directed toward that believer and

her context.4 Typically, but not necessarily always, this will be an

ordinary context in which a modest contrast class is relevant. To

make this case would require some serious argumentation on the part

of the contextualist, but I’m somewhat optimistic about its prospects

for success.5

Does this mean that the contextualist ought to build into the sen-

tence meaning of UEJs a reference to the subject’s perspective? Well,

4 See Hawthorne 2004 and Stanley 2005 for attempts to work out a believer-focused

version of semantic invariantism.5 For how this might go, see Williamson 2005.

808 MARK TIMMONS

it depends on how this is handled. It would be a mistake to turn a

normative epistemic judgment into a mere descriptive judgment about

what beliefs count as justified from the believer’s perspective. An

example of this mistake would be to construe UEJs as meaning,

‘Believer A counts as justified in believing p relative to the contrast

class that is fixed by A’s context.’ This sort of claim misses the norm-

ativity of UEJs. Someone who affirms unqualifiedly that A is justified

in believing p is presupposing that A’s context is the relevant context

for such evaluation. However one handles the particular semantics of

the concept of justification in use when we appraise a subject’s beliefs,

the normative force of such evaluations needs to be preserved.

Suppose (employing the concept of justification that addresses the

question, Is believer A justified in believing that p?) I say she is justi-

fied, and you say she isn’t. Then, if you mean to be addressing this

same question but you are appealing to your own interests and con-

sidering A’s belief as potential basis for deciding whether to believe

that p, you are making a mistake owing to a certain sort of subtle

conceptual confusion on your part. That is, in making an UEJ about

A, you are supposing that the appropriate context for evaluating A’s

believing that p is your own (in cases where you aren’t believer A).

We are engaged in a genuine disagreement. On the other hand, if,

upon further inquiry, it turns out that you are interested not in the

question, Is believer A justified in believing that p?, but rather in the

question, If I had A’s evidence would I, given my context, be justified

in believing that p?, then we are indeed talking past one another

because we are addressing different questions.

So what I’m proposing is that the relevance contextualist (1)

defend the view that the believer’s context is the relevant one in

addressing what I take to be the central question of concern when

we ask about the believer and the epistemic status of her beliefs,

and (2) develop an associated semantic story about such appraisals

that preserves their normativity and allows for at least some types

of genuine disagreement. This might not satisfy the sort of challenge

Sinnott-Armstrong means to be raising because he might be suppos-

ing that UEJs presuppose that there is some independent-of-perspec-

tive, metaphysically fixed contrast class (a REALLY REAL one).

Adding this to one’s analysis of UEJs would make such claims

metaphysically very robust. But here I think the relevance contextu-

alist should deny that UEJs really do presuppose such metaphysical

baggage.

If nothing else, Sinnott-Armstrong has called attention to a serious

lacunae in the (relevance) contextualist’s story, and his challenges, at

BOOK SYMPOSIUM 809

least in their generic versions, need to be fully addressed by its defend-

ers, a task I have not undertaken here.6

References

Hawthorne, John. 2004. Knowledge and Lotteries (Oxford and New

York: Oxford University Press).

Henderson, David and Horgan, Terry. 2000. ‘‘Iceberg Epistemology,’’

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61: 497–535.

Lewis, David. 1996. ‘‘Elusive Knowledge,’’ Australasian Journal of

Philosophy 74: 549–67.

Stanley, Jason. 2005. Knowledge and Practical Interests (Oxford and

New York: Oxford University Press).

Williamson, Timothy. 2005. ‘‘Knowledge, Context and the Agent’s

Point of View.’’ In G. Preyer and G. Peter (eds.), Contextualism in

Philosophy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press).

6 Thanks to Nathan Ballantyne, David Henderson, Terry Horgan, and Ian Evans.

Special thanks to Walter Sinnott-Armstrong for his generous comments on an

earlier draft of this commentary.

810 MARK TIMMONS