Umeå Workshop in Epistemology

Umeå Workshop in Epistemology

March 25th, 2026

HUM.H.119, Umeå University

10.15-12.00 Andrew Peet The Ethics of Interpretation: A Progress Report

Lunch @ Little Indian

13.15 – 15.00 Jordan Scott The Rational Bind of the Undecided Voter

Coffee

15.15 – 17.00 Pablo Zendejas Medina Cognitive Limitations and the Value-Free Ideal

Pub visit @ Lions Bar

Dinner @ Köksbaren

Contact [email protected] for questions or registration.

The Ethics of Interpretation: A Progress Report

Andrew Peet, Umeå University

We have an expectation that others at least attempt to interpret us ‘correctly’ (whatever that means), and we naturally feel indignation and resentment when we feel that others are making no attempt to do so. This suggests that we somehow wrong others when we make no attempt to interpret them correctly. Why is this? The answer we give will depend on how we conceive of interpretation. I start by considering some answers we might give from within the ‘interrogative’ view of interpretation – the view of interpretation as a sort of inquiry into what the speaker means. These answers derive from work on epistemic injustice, doxastic wrongdoing, and respect. All these approaches seem to get something right – but they all have problems. I then consider the question from within an alternative view of interpretation – the ‘sense-making view’. On this model interpretation aims at understanding of its object. I close with a couple of reasons why we might have moral reasons to understand one another, and how we might harm others when we make no effort to do so.

The Rational Bind of the Undecided Voter

Jordan Scott, Oxford University

In politics, trying to persuade the undecided can be a baffling exercise. Their judgments are notoriously volatile and unpredictable, sensitive to small, largely irrelevant reasons. Yet the same people can often be surprisingly resistant to persuasion, even when presented with good arguments and relevant facts. This behaviour is sometimes taken as evidence of ignorance, apathy, and even irrationality on the part of the undecided. In this paper, I argue otherwise. Being politically undecided typically comes with being in a particular kind of rational bind: one which means most attempts to genuinely persuade undecided voters are doomed to fail. It also suggests that both the resistant behaviour, and the volatile behaviour, can be simultaneously quite rational. Oddly, while their being persuaded that a candidate is best based on information about their policies may often be irrational, voting for them on a whim, or even out of spite, can be a far more rational way to cast their vote.

Cognitive Limitations and the Value-Free Ideal

Pablo Zendejas Medina, University of Helsinki

According to the value-free ideal, epistemic rationality depends only on evidence, and not on epistemic or practical values. In this talk, I'll argue that this ideal is only defensible given a highly idealized conception of reasoning: cognitively limited agents almost always face tradeoffs that can only be resolved by invoking values. To make this precise, I use the Bayesian model of rational belief and its justification in terms of the pursuit of (epistemic) utility. Orthodox Bayesianism is sometimes taken to vindicate the value-free conception of rationality, since its central requirements can be justified independently of an agent's particular goals. I explain what general structure an agent's cognitive abilities would need to have in order for rationality to remain value-independent, and show how these conditions fail in some natural models of bounded rationality. Time permitting, I'll also discuss how this conclusion relates to the question whether the reasoning of cognitively limited agents can always be decomposed into distinct parts, only one of which counts as inference or belief-revision in a narrow sense.