This talk will provide a version of the argument I and my co-authors make in a paper we’re currently working on. In the talk, I will discuss the concept of epistemic malevolence (EM), arguing against the received notion in the literature (offered by Jason Baehr, 2010) to give a broader characterisation that, I argue, captures its real scope. With a better notion of EM in mind, we are in a better position to combat bullshit in our communicative spaces, educational environments and more.
The current notion of EM will be attacked on two principle fronts. It fails to capture cases of EM that are: (i) not knowledge directed (but that affect an agent's epistemic character); and (ii) not robustly volitional (that do not involve an active opposition to the epistemic good by the malevolent agent).
Through arguing for (i) and (ii), I will suggest a widened notion of EM that accounts for edge cases. Doing this in fact allows us to see another deficiency with the received notion, it fails to capture cases of EM that are: (iii) structural rather than merely transactional. I will show that our widened notion can account for all the cases of epistemic malpractice the original notion aimed to capture, as well as the counterexamples discussed through (i), (ii) and (iii).
If time allows, I will finish by showing how considering this wider notion highlights the severity of the problem that EM poses for us, and how some suggested solutions would in fact fail to remedy the issue.