Justin Snedegar

I'll paste the email I sent out here.

Hi everyone,

I've emailed (most of) you before about this group, but things are a bit more worked out now. If you're interested in joining, let me know so you can be involved in deciding where/when to meet.

For those who don't know what it is, contrastivism (in epistemology) is a view, defended mainly by Jonathan Schaffer, which says that knowledge that p is always knowledge that p rather than q, for some 'contrast proposition' q. Thus, the knowledge relation is not binary - Ksp - but ternary - Kspq. Here is Schaffer, from "Contrastive Knowledge":

"Does G.E. Moore know that he has hands? Yes, says the dogmatist: Moore's hands are right before his eyes. No, says the skeptic: for all Moore knows he could be a brain in a vat. Yes and no, says the contrastivist: yes, Moore knows that he has hands rather than stumps; but no, Moore does not know that he has hands rather than vat-images of hands."

So, contrastivism is a cousin both to the relevant alternatives view and to contextualism in epistemology. We'll find out why we should prefer contrastivism to either of those views, I assume.

The first paper we'll read is Schaffer's "Contrastive Knowledge". You can find it on his website, or, more conveniently, I have set up a drop.io site with all of the readings that we'll cover. Here's the link: http://drop.io/usccontrastivism. If, at any point, you need a password (which you shouldn't), it's 'contrastivism'. On that site, you can view the papers, without downloading them, or download them.

I know some of you are not in L.A. If you're interested in joining, we can use the drop.io site to do something online for you.

We'll plan to start the week of June 8. Email me if you're interested.

Justin