If you ask me a nosy question, have you violated my privacy? Put another way: does your intrusive question genuinely intrude? This paper offers a new argument for answering yes. Face-to-face conversation renders us uniquely vulnerable to each other. When you ask me a question, you sometimes undermine my effective control over whether to reveal the answer to you. Without coercing me, or violating my property rights, or literally reading my mind, you can force information from me against my will. (...) Surprisingly, much of the time you may permissibly force this information from me. But when you ask me a question about my private affairs, and you thereby force private information from me, you violate my privacy rights. My discussion reveals the moral complexity of information flow in face-to-face conversations and raises new questions about the value and function of some of our politeness practices. (shrink)

This paper begins with a discussion the role of less-than-admirable epistemic emotions in our respectable, indeed admirable inquiries: nosiness, obsessiveness, wishful thinking, denial, partisanship. The explanation for their desirable effect is Mandevillian: because of the division of epistemic labour individual epistemic vices can lead to shared knowledge. In fact it is sometimes essential to it.

I discuss a large number of emotions that are relevant to performance at epistemic tasks. My central concern is the possibility that it is not the emotions that are most relevant to success of these tasks but associated virtues. I present cases in which it does seem to be the emotions rather than the virtues that are doing the work. I end of the paper by mentioning the connections between desirable and undesirable epistemic emotions.