The aim of this paper is two-fold. We argue against the received conception of epistemic malevolence and give a broader characterisation that, we argue, captures its real scope. We tackle the current notion of epistemic malevolence (EM) on three fronts. We claim that this notion fails to capture cases of EM that are (i) not knowledge directed (but that affect the agent's epistemic character), (ii) not robustly volitional (that do not involve an active opposition to the epistemic good by the (...) malevolent agent) and that (iii) are not merely transactional (as opposed to structural). As a result, we claim that the received notion of EM fails to recognise (arguably) clear instances of EM because it is too narrow. Ultimately, we argue that such narrowness gives the false impression that, unlike its moral counterpart, EM is uncommon. After arguing for this, we offer a wider characterisation of EM and show the role this can play in generating solutions to the problem the phenomena poses. (shrink)

Fictionalism is a popular approach to handling possible worlds discourse. It gives one the power of possible world semantics without being committed to undesirable consequences. The standard approach of reparsing possible world statements by attaching a fictional operator suffers from a problem that we argue is structural for all kinds of narrow fictionalism. To show this, we develop a toy theory of temporal fictionalism, showing that it is vulnerable to the same problem. We develop a solution in the form of (...) a broad account of modal fictionalism. Broad modal fictionalism is a contentious view and its usefulness needs to be clarified. Given this, towards the end of the paper we offer some motivations for why broad modal fictionalism is useful and gesture towards how modal talk arises in everyday discourse. (shrink)