3rd Nordic Epistemology Network Workshop

The Nordic Epistemology Network Workshop is a two-day epistemology workshop taking place on June 9th-10th 2025, organized by members of the Nordic Epistemology Network.

Speakers:

• Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (Aarhus University)
• Pablo Zendejas Medina (University of Helsinki)
• Hugo Ribeiro Mota (University of Oslo)
• Cameron Boult (Brandon University)
• Olav Benjamin Vassend (University of Inland Norway)
• Carolina Flores (UC Santa Cruz)
• Louise Clover (University of Oslo)
• Ylwa Sjolin Wirling (Gothenburg University)

Commentators-at-large:

• Anna-Sara Malmgren (University of Inland Norway)
• Maria Lasonen-Aarnio (University of Helsinki)
• Jaakko Hirvela (University of Helsinki)

June 9th:

09:30 – 10:00 — Arrival & Coffee

10:00 – 11:30 — Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen: Knowledge, Ignorance, and Autonomy

11:30 – 11:45 — Coffee break

11:45 – 13:15 — Pablo Zendeja's Medina: Inference, Revision, and Evidence

13:15 – 14:30 — Lunch

14:30 – 16:00 — Hugo Ribeiro Mota: The Social Epistemology of Peace Mediation

16:00 – 16:15 — Coffee break

16:15 – 17:45 — Cameron Boult: Relation-Based Epistemology

June 10th:

10:00 – 11:30 — Olav Benjamin Vassend: A Unified Subjectivist Framework for Decision-Making Under Moral Uncertainty

11:30 – 11:45 — Coffee break

11:45 – 13:15 — Carolina Flores: When Elites Call Trauma: Hermeneutical Injustice, and the Capture of the Means of Interpretation

13:15 – 14:30 — Lunch

14:30 – 16:00 — Louise Clover: No Epistemic Norms on Belief Formation

16:00 – 16:15 — Coffee break

16:15 – 17:45 — Ylwa Sjolin Wirling: Metaphilosophy and Ethics

Abstracts:

Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen: Knowledge, Ignorance, and Autonomy . It is almost universally agreed that valid consent must be adequately informed, but no substantive account of what this amounts to has won widespread acceptance. In particular, it has proven difficult to understand how this requirement can be compatible with (i) the fact that valid yet apparently uninformed consent is widespread, for instance in medical practice and online; and (ii) that we can plausibly exercise a right not to know what we consent to. This paper is part of a broader project aimed at developing an account of informed consent that explains and accommodates that informed consent is consistent with significant ignorance about what is being consented to. The working hypothesis of the project is that cases of apparently uninformed but valid consent should be analyzed in terms of the consenter being suitably informed about her own ignorance. This paper contributes to this project by discussing the significance of knowledge and ignorance for autonomous agency.

Pablo Zendeja's Medina: Inference, Revision, and Evidence . How should we reason when we discover that our beliefs are inconsistent, or that they undermine one another? A natural answer is that we should use our evidence to resolve such conflicts, but what if that evidence isn't available, or if there's no time to consider it? In this talk, I'll show how the concept of evidential support can be used to develop principles of belief revision that apply to reasoners who, like us, can only reason with a small part of their information at any given time. Time permitting, I'll then apply these principles to questions about the normativity of logic, higher-order evidence, and the permissivism-uniqueness debate.

Hugo Ribeiro Mota: The Social Epistemology of Peace Mediation . There is an unfortunate rise in armed conflicts around the globe. One of our most successful tools for non-violent conflict resolution is peace mediation. The challenges faced by mediators are many, and issues about knowledge production and communication are ubiquitous. There are problems that arise while stakeholders collect information and produce their stock of knowledge. Another set of problems may arise within the structures of information collection, knowledge production, and communicative exchange developed and utilized by the mediating team itself. There has not been any systematic philosophical investigation of the epistemological and communicative structures of peace mediation, which I claim is a necessary step to arriving at clearer explanations of the problems. This is because such a philosophical investigation would provide more conceptual support and refinement to the discussion, making it so that critical issues are better understood and that strategies to solve or mitigate them are more clearly transmitted. The need for such a philosophical investigation becomes even more pressing given the fact that there are problems within the structures for information collection, knowledge production, and communicative exchange of mediators that have yet to be clearly identified. One such problem occurs when recognition is not paid to local knowledge producers (eg civil society groups, social movements) that offered relevant and significant knowledge to the mediating team. Another connected problem occurs when the mediation team may set agendas that misrepresent or directly harm this unrecognized group. These problems are not only ethical, but also epistemic, due to the fact that they originate from harmful epistemic practices. Ultimately, these practices may generate a peace agreement that fails to set the grounds for an inclusive and sustainable post-conflict environment. Therefore, philosophers have an important role in figuring out ways to identify, mitigate, and overcome such issues, fostering inclusive, fair, and effective mediation processes.

Cameron Boult: Relation-Based Epistemology. The idea that people stand in distinctively epistemic relations has been used to illuminate epistemic blame, epistemic atonement, interpersonal reasoning, freedom of belief, and the grip of epistemic normativity. While a growing number use epistemic relations in theorizing about epistemic phenomena, to date most of this theorizing has taken place at highly abstract, idealized levels. Comparatively little has been said about the role epistemic relations might play in more ameliorative, non-ideal areas of epistemology. In this presentation, I make a step towards filling this gap. I first highlight the usefulness of epistemic relations in abstract theorizing, focusing on questions about the source of epistemic normativity. I then turn to the usefulness of epistemic relations in more ameliorative and non-ideal contexts, focusing on epistemic exclusion, a phenomenon widely discussed at the intersection of testimonial injustice, decolonial epistemology, and standpoint epistemology. I argue that certain forms of epistemic exclusion impair our epistemic relations, and that epistemic exclusion is one way of missing out on the distinctive value of standing in good epistemic relations. Good epistemic relations ground a distinctive pro tanto normative reason to mitigate epistemic exclusion. I explore some concrete ideas about what this implies for our epistemic practices, and then close by going meta: since epistemic relations already play a role in theorizing about epistemic normativity, exploring their prescriptive implications on an ameliorative level opens ways to pursue certain kinds of ideal and non-ideal projects within a unifying framework. This is a novel meta-epistemological reason to give epistemic relations a more central role in epistemology.

Olav Benjamin Vassend: A Unified Subjectivist Framework for Decision-Making Under Moral Uncertainty . We are often unsure not just about empirical facts, but about what we morally ought to do. While orthodox decision theory handles descriptive uncertainty well, existing approaches to moral uncertainty—such as going with your favorite moral theory, maximizing expected choice-worthiness, employing a voting system, or using precautionary reasoning—face serious difficulties and appear to have little in common. We show that many of these apparently disparate proposals—or versions thereof—may be regarded as special cases of a single, unified subjectivist framework. Central to this framework is the notion of conditional utility: the value an agent assigns to an outcome on the assumption that a particular moral theory is correct. We first demonstrate, under standard decision-theoretic assumptions, that these conditional utilities can be meaningfully calibrated onto a common scale. We then ask how an agent's overall (unconditional) utilities should be constructed from this set of calibrated conditional utilities. A representation theorem establishes that every aggregation rule satisfying a set of natural constraints must fall within a one‑parameter family, where the lone parameter is best interpreted as the agent's degree of moral risk aversion. By adjusting this single parameter, one recovers (subjectivist versions of) most proposals in the existing literature. The framework therefore unifies these approaches and reveals what was previously implicit: each proposal reflects a distinct stance on moral risk.

Carolina Flores: When Elites Call Trauma: Hermeneutical injustice, and the capture of the means of interpretation: Not infrequently, members of privileged groups call trauma: they frame a complex situation around the trauma they claim to have endured. I analyze a case study of this phenomenon: culturally prevalent descriptions of Portuguese decolonization that center the trauma experienced by settlers. In doing so, I offer an account of the characteristic harms that occur when elites call trauma. Appeals to trauma orient our attention, explanation, and evaluation: they award the status of victim, close off inquiry into victims’ past conduct, focus care on them, and institute a demand for repair. Though this is a productive frame to have, its application under unjust conditions can result in distortion even when trauma claims may be descriptively accurate, perpetrating hermeneutical injustice. I then argue that this implies a profound shift in how we think of hermeneutical injustice. Contra Fricker, not only can hermeneutical injustice occur without conceptual gaps, it can even occur as the result of using hermeneutical resources that we positively want in our repertoire. Hermeneutical justice is not fundamentally about the quality of the stock of hermeneutical resources we have, but about who controls the means of interpretation, with their elite capture emerging as the central root of hermeneutical injustice.

Louise Clover: No Epistemic Norms on Belief Formation . An influential argument due to Jane Friedman posits that traditional epistemic norms conflict with highly plausible norms of inquiry, or "zetetic" norms. Friedman suggests that this conflict is best resolved by bringing epistemic normativity under the purview of zetetic normativity. This move would entail a radical revision of the domain of the epistemic. In this paper, I argue that the conflict Friedman proposes can be dissolved only by distinguishing the act of forming a belief from the patterns of attention and reasoning that lead to belief formation. But once we make this distinction clear, something surprising happens: the epistemic norms on belief formation disappear. Thus, epistemologists are left with a choice. Either follow Friedman or deny that there are epistemic norms on belief formation. The latter option is the better one.

Ylwa Sjolin Wirling: Metaphilosophy and ethics. In this talk I'll introduce a puzzle facing theories about the aim of philosophical inquiry and the nature of philosophical progress, discuss its significance and consider some moves one could make in response to it. The puzzle is this: It seems prima facie reasonable to assume that ethics is a significant and central branch of analytical, academic philosophy. So, most metaphilosophers will want their account of philosophical progress to be applicable also to ethics. However, a common assumption underlying many accounts in metaphilosophy is that philosophy's subject matter is a set of truths that are out there for us to investigate. Different views differ on what epistemic state they think philosophy should bring about with respect to these truths, and we may or may not have had much success in getting at them—but in any case, there are in some sense facts of the matter we are looking into. But a good number of philosophers who spend their careers on moral thought and talk do not conceive of ethics' subject matter in this way: anti-realist non-cognitivist views of ethics' subject matter are widely considered to be serious contenders. What can and should metaphilosophers say about the aim and mode of progress in ethics, and on ethics' place within philosophy, on the assumption that anti-realist non-cognitivist views are correct?