Intellectual mismanagement and epistemic blaming emotions

Abstract It is becoming increasingly popular to maintain that investigative norms relating to evidence gathering and evaluation fall within the purview of epistemic normativity. Meanwhile, the view that we engage in a distinctive form of epistemic blame toward violations of epistemic norms is also gaining support. However, since the most prevalent theories of epistemic blame do not center on emotions, the role of emotions in our responses to investigative violations has yet to be the focus of thorough examination. But whether or not emotions are required for epistemic blame , the question of whether we feel epistemic blaming emotions in response to bad investigation is interesting in its own right. The aim of this paper is to address this latter question by providing an account of epistemic blaming emotions and then assessing whether standard cases of investigative norm violations are apt to provoke these sorts of emotions. I argue for a skeptical conclusion, namely that we currently lack good evidence for positing epistemic blaming emotions in response to investigative violations.