CFA: Uppsala Epistemology Workshop: Inquiry and Epistemic Harms

Much recent work in epistemology and metanormativity is concerned with questions about how, if at all, non-epistemic considerations bear on what we should believe and how we should conduct inquiry. For instance, are there moral and/or prudential constraints on inquiry and deliberation? Can beliefs be harmful and/or wrong, and if so, do we thereby have reason not to form such beliefs? The workshop aims to provide a constructive forum to make progress on these and related questions, with a focus on the topics of inquiry and epistemic harms (both very broadly construed).

The workshop will go on for two days in Uppsala, Sweden, and there will be ten talks in total. Five talks will be given by invited speakers and five talks will be selected on the basis of submitted abstracts.

Invited speakers:

- Rima Basu (Claremont McKenna College)
- Jaakko Hirvelä (University of Helsinki)
- Elís Miller Larsen (Harvard University)
- Sarah Paul (New York University-Abu Dhabi)
- Alex Worsnip & Z Quanbeck (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

We welcome abstracts on all questions having to do with inquiry, epistemic harm, and other nearby issues. Abstracts should be 1000-1200 words long, be prepared for blind review, and be suitable for a 35-minute presentation. Please submit your abstracts to [email protected].

Each speaker will also give brief comments (ca. 5 minutes) on one other talk. To facilitate this, we will ask speakers to send us their papers two weeks in advance of the workshop.

Each speaker will be provided with 3 days of accommodation, and meals throughout the workshop.

Important dates:

Submission deadline: March 5th, 2022

Decision of acceptance: March 20th, 2022

Workshop: June 16th-17th, 2022

Our current, tentative plan is for the workshop to be in-person only. This plan could change depending on how the COVID-19 pandemic develops.

The workshop is organized by the research project “The Wisdom of the Crowd”, which is funded by the Swedish Research Council and studies the epistemic significance of agreement and other questions in social epistemology, in collaboration with the Uppsala Forum on Democracy, Peace and Justice. For any questions, please contact Olle Risberg ([email protected]) or Daniel Fogal ([email protected]).

We hope you will join us for two exciting days of philosophy here in Uppsala!