Contrastivism in Philosophy

Martijn Blaauw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136303746
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

Contrastivism can be applied to a variety of problems within philosophy, and as such, it can be coherently seen as a unified movement. This volume brings together state-of-the-art research on the contrastive treatment of philosophical concepts and questions, including knowledge, belief, free will, moral luck, Bayesian confirmation theory, causation, and explanation.

1 Contrastive Explanation

Christopher Hitchcock

Numerous authors have claimed that the truth, or at least the felicity, of an explanatory claim is sensitive to contrast. For example, consider the following explanatory claims:

1. Adam ate the apple because he was hungry.¹
2. Susan was arrested because she stole the bicycle.²

Fleshing out the details of the stories in appropriate ways, we might hear

1a. Adam ate the apple, rather than giving it back to Eve, because he was hungry

as true, and

1b.Adam ate the apple, rather than the pear, because he was hungry

as false. For instance, if Adam was sufficiently hungry that he would have indiscriminately eaten the first edible thing handed to him by Eve, we might accept 1a and reject 1b. Similarly, we might hear

2a. Susan was arrested because she stole the bicycle, rather than buying it

as true, and

2b.Susan was arrested because she stole the bicycle, rather than the skis

as false (where Susan robbed a sporting goods store). For instance, if the police were not singularly vigilant about catching bicycle thieves, and if Susan could not have used the skis to effect a rapid downhill getaway, we might accept 2a and reject 2b (but see section 3.1 below for a caveat).

Early discussions of this phenomenon include Hansson (1974), Dretske (1977), van Fraassen (1980), Garfinkel (1981), and Achinstein (1983). Some more recent attempts to explain the phenomenon include Lewis (1986a), Hitchcock (1996, 1999), and Lipton (2004). In this paper, I will discuss the types of contrastive explanation and the sources of contrast-sensitivity in explanation. Of course, explanations frequently cite causal information, so the contrast-sensitivity of explanation is closely related to the contrast-sensitivity of causation, which is discussed in detail in Jonathan Schaferh's contribution to this volume (Schafer 2012).

1 THE GRAMMAR OF EXPLANATION

Following Hempel (1965), I will say that an explanation is an answer to an explicit or implicit explanation-seeking “why?” question. Such a question has the canonical form:

Why is it the case that A?

where A is a proposition describing some event, state of affairs, or fact. A response to this question has the form:

A because B

where B is also a proposition or set of propositions. A is the explanandum and B is the explanans. I will argue in section 6 below that explanations in fact have a more complex structure, but this basic terminology will help to get us started.

Note that I do not assume that all “why?” questions are requests for explanations. Some are requests for reasons or justifications. If I say in exasperation, after my car breaks down on the freeway, “why does this always happen to me?”, I would typically be understood as asking something like “what have I done to deserve this misfortune?”, and not “what are the typical causal antecedents that lead to events like this one?” Likewise, “how?” questions can sometimes be requests for explanations, although they can also be requests for specifics about the nature of an event. If I ask, “how did George die?”, I might be looking for an answer like: “He had severe arteriosclerosis. When he exerted himself by climbing the stairs, his heart could not receive enough oxygenated blood, and it failed.” But I might (if I were feeling macabre) be looking for an answer like: “first he clutched his chest, then his eyes rolled into his head, then he keeled over backwards.” Only the first of these answers constitutes an explanation of George's death.

Moreover, not all uses of the word “explanation” pick out the sorts of things that can be answers to explanation-seeking why questions. If I explain the rules of chess to you, I might be answering the question “how do you play chess?”, but I am not answering the question “why do you play chess?” I will here be using the word “explanation” in the narrow sense, meaning the kind of thing that can be expressed by a proposition of the form “A because B” in response to an explanation-seeking “why?” question of the form “why is it the case that A?”

2 CONTRAST

There are a number of linguistic devices for inviting contrast. Perhaps the most simple is the phrase “rather than” as used in sentences 1a through 2b in the previous section. “Rather than” can be used to introduce contrast with one or more explicitly mentioned items, or with a class of items. Here are some examples:

1. Adam ate the apple rather than the pear.
2. Adam ate the apple rather than the pear or the banana.
3. Adam ate the apple, rather than one of the other fruits on the table.
4. Adam ate the apple rather than giving it back to Eve.
5. Adam ate the apple rather than doing something else with it.
6. Adam, rather than Eve, ate the apple.
7. Adam, rather than one of the other guests at the party, ate the apple.

Each of these sentences does three things: (i) it asserts that Adam ate the apple; (ii) it explicitly asserts, or at least directly implies, that various alternatives to Adam's eating the apple did not occur; and (iii) it invites a contrast between Adam's eating the apple and the other alternatives mentioned. Sentences 3 through 9 agree with respect to what they assert in (i), but they deny different alternatives in (ii) and invite different contrasts in (iii). For example, sentence 3 contrasts Adam's eating the apple with his eating the pear, whereas 4 contrasts it with his eating the pear and with his eating the banana. I will call the proposition asserted by the sentence the “focus,” and the contrasting alternatives “foils.”³ Note that I said in part (ii) that each sentence explicitly asserts, or directly implies, that various alternatives do not occur. If our background theory entails that the various alternatives are incompatible—for example, if it implies that Adam will eat only one thing, or that only one person can eat the apple—then the non-contrastive sentence “Adam ate the apple” will imply that these alternatives did not occur, as will all of the sentences 3 through 9.

Note that “rather than” takes a noun phrase, rather than a clause, as its completion. We don't say:

3a.*Adam ate the apple rather than Adam ate the pear.⁴

This grammatical feature of our use of “rather than” is misleading. The contrast invoked is between two propositions or states of affairs. For example, sentence 3 invites a contrast between

Adam ate the apple

and

Adam ate the pear.

Sentence 3 does not assert that Adam ate some contrastive object, the apple-rather-than-the-pear.

There are a number of other expressions that function in essentially the same way as “rather than”—for example, “as opposed to” and “in contrast with.” Thus the following sentences are synonymous with 3:

3c. Adam ate the apple, as opposed to the pear.

3d. Adam ate the apple, in contrast with the pear.

There are other linguistic devices for inviting contrasts. One is stress or emphasis. In written language, stress is indicated using underlining , boldface, CAPS, or italics (which I will use from here on). In spoken language, it is indicated using increased volume and, in English at least, rising intonation. Here are some examples:

10.Adam ate the apple.

11.Adam ate the apple.

12.Adam ate the apple.

Sentences bearing stress invite contrasts with sentences that result from substituting alternatives for the stressed item. Thus 10 invites contrast with “Adam ate the pear,” “Adam ate the banana,” and so on; 12 invites contrast with “Eve ate the apple,” “Abel ate the apple,” and so on. Because these sentences don't mention explicit alternatives, the range of possible substitutions must be determined by context. For instance, context will determine whether Adam's eating the apple is to be contrasted with his eating one of the other fruits in the fruit bowl, or with his eating meat, cheese, bread, etc. Cleft and pseudocleft constructions function in much the same way:

13.It was the apple that Adam ate.

14.What Adam ate was the apple.

15.It was Adam who ate th...