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This chapter begins with a discussion of the closure principle and the problem it poses for the relevant alternatives account of perceptual knowledge. It then turns to a new position known as contrastivism, which denies the closure principle. According to the contrastivist, knowledge is to be always understood contrastively, in the sense that one never knows that p simpliciter. Instead, one knows that p rather than each one of a set of contrasts (i.e., alternatives) to p, where knowing that a proposition obtains rather than one of the contrasts is explicitly understood in terms of discriminating the target proposition from the specified contrasts.

In this initial exposition of contextualism, the view is explained and distinguished from other views, and especially from its rival, invariantism, whose two main forms, classical invariantism and subject-sensitive invariantism, are explained. The various views are discussed largely by reference to how they handle examples that display an important feature of the ordinary usage of ‘know(s)’: that what speakers are happy to call ‘knowledge’ in some contexts they won't count as such in others. After various preliminary issues are addressed and a brief history of contextualism is provided, the relation between contextualist solutions to philosophical skepticism and contextualism's roots in what transpires in ordinary, non-philosophical conversation is discussed.

Transitivity seems to underlie basic features of our causal reasoning: it is typical to justify a claim that C causes E by pointing out that C causes D, which in turn causes E. Preserving transitivity seems to be a basic desideratum for an adequate analysis of causation, and appealing to it has often seemed essential for handling problem cases like those involving preemption. But recent work on causation has raised serious challenges to the claim that it is invariably transitive. The aim of this chapter is to distinguish these various challenges and to consider several responses to these challenges in detail. To that end, we critically discuss a causal modelling proposal and a contrastive proposal for handling challenging cases that combine transitivity with double prevention. We also discuss the nuances of switching cases, and show how to avoid mismatch of aspects by changing to a more subtle treatment of causes and effects.

Despite disagreements on some moral issues, almost all individuals and cultures agree on certain basic moral judgments, such as that theft, rape, and murder of peers for personal gain are immoral. Psychopaths seem to be an exception. To test this common assumption, this chapter surveys research on moral judgments in psychopaths. The evidence is less clear than many assume, but probably some psychopaths disagree with our fundamental moral judgments. Does this disagreement support the skeptical conclusion that our fundamental moral judgments are not epistemically justified? Not if psychopaths are irrational, but the argument is that they are not irrational in any way that would justify dismissing their views as irrelevant to moral epistemology. These conclusions have radical implications within many theories, but contrastivist moral epistemology is shown to handle these surprising facts.

A number of arguments against the epistemological views motivated by the salient alternative, contrast and practical factor effects are set forth. The negative arguments suggest that these effects reflect folk epistemological practices that are heuristically useful but systematically inaccurate. On this basis, it is argued that taking these effects as straightforward evidence for epistemological theorizing has consequences that are problematic so that we should instead consider whether strict purist invariantism may account for them. In this manner, Chapter 4 provides some substantive arguments that simultaneously shed light on epistemological matters and offer a guide to the subsequent empirical account of the systematic errors in folk knowledge ascriptions.

This chapter motivates and introduces contrastivism about reasons at a general level. Both the concept of a normative reason and then the nature of a contrastivist theory of some concept are discussed, including the role of questions and question relativity. Finally, I explore the place of contrastivism about reasons within the more general contrastivist program in philosophy, which seeks to defend contrastive theories of a wide range of important concepts, including obligation, justification, and explanation. The conclusion reached is that support for contrastivism about reasons should be direct, rather than relying on the success of the contrastivist program more generally.

This chapter argues for a contrastive treatment of discourse about reasons, beginning from a puzzle about claims employing ‘rather than’, of the form ‘R is a reason for A rather than B’. Various non-contrastive analyses of these claims are rejected, and a contrastive account of reason discourse that solves the puzzle is developed. The analysis is a version of contextualism about reason discourse. This contrastive account is then applied to a puzzle, which is due to Mark Schroeder, about negative reason existentials—claims like ‘There’s no reason to cry over spilled milk’. The conclusion is that contrastivism provides the best account of our talk about reasons.

This chapter considers a shallow contrastivist view, according to which it is only our talk about reasons that is contrastive. Reasons themselves, or, more precisely, the normative favoring relation, is non-contrastive and gradable. This non-contrastive favoring relation underlies contrastive reason ascriptions, so that reason ascriptions are analyzed as expressing comparative claims about the degree to which a consideration favors one option over the relevant alternatives. This view is rejected because the crucial normative favoring relation itself is contrastive; thus, we should adopt a deeper form of contrastivism. The relationship between an agent’s reasons and what she ought to do is discussed. I defend a particular view about this relationship, such that what an agent ought to do, out of a given set of alternatives, is the option that wins—is most strongly supported by reasons—in each of its pairwise comparisons with the other options.

This chapter raises a problem for contrastivism: we should capture certain entailments between reasons relative to different sets of alternatives, but the theory as developed to this point lacks a way to do that. That is, the theory seems to allow for objectionably unconstrained contrast-sensitivity of reasons. This threatens to make some kinds of deliberation impossible. This problem is solved by adopting a version of contrastivism that relies on the widespread idea that reasons are to be explained in terms of the promotion of certain kinds of objectives—desires, values, and so on. This theory provides just the right kinds of constraints on the contrast-sensitivity of reasons. In fact, contrastivism about reasons better accounts for the relationship between reasons and promotion than non-contrastive theories, which provides independent motivation for the theory.

This chapter applies contrastivism to an important debate in normative ethics. Contrastivism about reasons seems initially well placed to accommodate the supposed intransitivity of normative relations such as ‘better than’ or ‘more reason than’. But the theory as developed in Chapter 4 rules out a certain kind of intransitivity of reasons. This chapter shows that, nevertheless, the contrastivist can accommodate the intransitivity of ‘more reason than’, but that doing so is optional. The crucial move is to let the importance of reason-providing objectives vary with the alternatives. The contrastivist about reasons need not accept this further thesis, and a non-contrastivist about reasons may accept it. Nevertheless, it is a particularly natural thesis for a contrastivist to accept. The chapter rehearses familiar arguments for intransitivity, based on examples from Derek Parfit and due to Larry Temkin and Stuart Rachels, but also raises serious challenges for any theory that accepts intransitivity.

This chapter applies contrastivism to an issue in epistemology, and a parallel issue in the theory of practical reasoning. This is the rationality of withholding or suspending belief or intention. Popular theories of epistemic rationality struggle to explain why agents always ought to withhold belief when their evidence for and against the relevant proposition is tied or balanced. The contrastive theory of reasons and ought developed in the first four chapters can explain this straightforwardly. The account of rational withholding of belief is generalized to the practical case of withholding intention. The conclusion is that contrastivism about reasons has advantages in areas in which reasons are important, such as epistemology and practical reasoning. There is a brief conclusion to the book.

This final chapter discusses alternatives to contextualism. Since classical invariantism has been a foil for the whole discussion in the book, it needs no special, repeated treatment here. Rather, three more recent views are being considered: subject-sensitive invariantism according to which the truth value of knowledge ascriptions can vary with the context of the subject rather than the attributor; epistemic contrastivism according to which knowledge is a ternary relation between a subject, a target proposition, and a contrast proposition; and finally semantic relativism about “knowledge” which claims relativity of the truth value of knowledge ascriptions to the standards of the assessor of the claim. It turns out that these alternative accounts of knowledge do worse than contextualism and have to face much more severe problems.

Ethicists increasingly reject the scale as a useful metaphor for weighing reasons. Yet they generally retain the metaphor of a reason’s weight. This combination is incoherent. The metaphor of weight entails a very specific scale-based model of weighing reasons, Dual Scale. Justin Snedegar worries that scale-based models of weighing reasons can’t properly weigh reasons against an option. Chapter 4 shows that there are, in fact, two different reasons for/against distinctions, and provides an account of the relationship between the various kinds of reason for and against. With this account in hand, we’ll see that Dual Scale has no problem weighing any kind of reason against.

This chapter argues that causal idealism, the view that causation is a product of mental activity, is at least as attractive as several contemporary views of causation that incorporate human thought and agency into the causal relation. The chapter discusses three such views: contextualism, which holds that truth conditions for causal judgments are contextual; contrastivism, which holds that the causal relation is a quaternary relation between a cause, an effect, and contextually specified contrast classes for the cause and the effect; and pragmatism, which holds that causal claims are sensitive to pragmatic factors. This chapter suggests that causal idealism has at least as much explanatory strength as these three theories, and is more parsimonious and internally stable.

This chapter defends the provocative claim that if a certain popular view of virtue is true, then virtue has no intrinsic value, and so it can play no useful role in moral theory. The view in question is virtue consequentialism—roughly, the idea that virtues are good because of the good consequences they bring. Versions of the view can be found in the works of Julia Driver, Philippa Foot, and Rosalind Hursthouse. This chapter argues that the only tenable variant of virtue consequentialism is contrastivism: the idea that a character trait is or is not a virtue only in comparison with another trait. The problem is that if this view is right, then virtues cannot be used in evaluating either people or outcomes. So if virtue ought to play a role in such evaluation, then virtue consequentialism ought to be rejected.

Chapter 2 presents the particular reasons locutions on which the book focuses, and argue that one of them is fundamental. The chapter identifies the logical form of this fundamental reasons locution by introducing the idea that ‘reason’ is a predicate/operator hybrid. It then shows why ‘reason’ as a count noun is not ambiguous in any way (contra Mark Schroeder and John Broome), and offer arguments against Justin Snedegar’s claim that reasons locutions are contrastive and John Skorupski’s claim that reasons locutions have an epistemic parameter and/or a weight parameter.