disjunctivist

A disjunctivist is a philosopher who holds a disjunctivist view about knowledge or justification. Disjunctivism in epistemology is a response to skepticism. Instead of explaining knowledge as a state that is similar in both cases of knowing and cases of merely appearing to know (e.g., through hallucination), disjunctivists argue that knowledge is fundamentally different from non-knowing conditions. When one knows something, they are in a distinctive cognitive relation to the facts that is not present in cases of mere illusion or hallucination.

There are different forms of disjunctivism. Strong disjunctivism asserts that the conditions for knowledge are not only different from, but also incompatible with, the conditions for non-knowledge. For example, seeing a genuine apple is a relation to an apple that is fundamentally different from the experience of hallucinating an apple, even if the experiences appear subjectively identical. Weak disjunctivism, on the other hand, allows for some overlap in the sensory or cognitive basis of knowledge and non-knowledge. The core idea remains that the positive condition of knowing is a special kind of achievement or relation, not merely a matter of having a certain kind of mental state that could also be present in error. Disjunctivism offers an alternative to traditional accounts of knowledge that often rely on necessary and sufficient conditions, or externalist accounts that focus on reliable processes.