Contrastivism

This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (May 2017) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Contrastivism, or the contrast theory of meaning, is an epistemological theory proposed by Jonathan Schaffer that suggests that knowledge attributions have a ternary structure of the form 'S knows that p rather than q'. This is in contrast to the traditional view whereby knowledge attributions have a binary structure of the form 'S knows that p'. Contrastivism was suggested as an alternative to contextualism. Both are semantic theories that try to explain skepticism using semantic methods.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong proposed in a paper titled "A Contrastivist Manifesto"^[1] a variant of contrastivism that, he argues, differs from contextualism, invariantism, and Schaffer's contrastivism.

Ernest Gellner in Words and Things "terms derive their meaning from the fact that there are or could be things which fall under them and that there are others which do not."^[2]