摘要：Charging other people with intellectual vice is an important part of human life. One journalist might accuse another of being a narrow-minded conspiracy theorist, for example, or a lecturer might accuse her student of being intellectually lazy when he once again fails to do the required reading. We make “epistemic vice-charges,” as Kidd calls them, for various reasons.1 Ideally, they can improve our dialectical situation by identifying, explaining, evaluating, and correcting bad epistemic activity. Less nobly, they can be used to stain a rival’s reputation, or to make laypersons doubt an expert’s testimony. Kidd distinguishes robust and rhetorical vice-charges.2 In rhetorical cases, one agent negatively evaluates another but cannot “elaborate or ‘unpack’ the charge . . . by explaining the reasoning that supports the negative judgment.”3 A rhetorical charge lacks epistemic force. Even if it is widely endorsed, without evidence to back it up it is indistinguishable from arbitrary name calling, and thus cannot advance a debate in an epistemically admissible way. But if a charge receives adequate evidential support it becomes robust, has real dialectical force, and can play a role in epistemic life.
