Conclusion
I have considered some important areas of overlap between intellectual humility and epistemic trust. But I have left a number of topics undiscussed, including other types of situation, beside self-trust and testimony, in which epistemic trust and intellectual humility can inform each other.
For example, disagreement might threaten a person's epistemic self-trust, and intellectual humility might help him navigate the appropriate response, including helping him learn from it rather than intellectually barricade himself (Whitcomb et al. 2017, 524; Dormandy 2018). And intellectual humility is surely among the epistemic virtues of a “Socratic authority” (Jager 2016, 179), a kind of epistemic authority who, by modeling virtuous thinking, helps transmit understanding (as opposed to piecemeal knowledge). So more work is needed to build on the groundwork laid here.Suffice it for now to summarize this groundwork. Intellectual humility promotes effective epistemic self-trust by enabling a person to assess the extent of her own epistemic trustworthiness, and by ensuring that she is motivated to epistemically self-improve should that evaluation prove negative. It also promotes effective epistemic trust in other people: it puts a hearer of testimony in a position to assess his need for epistemic assistance and his aptitude for selecting testifiers, and it puts a speaker in a position to be epistemically trustworthy. Not a bad record for a humble virtue.14
Notes
1 Some argue that one- or two-place trust is more basic. See e.g. Jones (2004), and Domenicucci and Holton (2017).
2 Trust, either in ourselves or others, is not necessary for knowledge; merely relying on ourselves or others is an option, though less effective. See Dormandy (2020).
3 It may be possible for a trustee to fail to be epistemically trustworthy without being untrustworthy; if so, then trusting either sort of person is ineffective but here I'll focus on untrustworthiness.
4 Situationists deny that people have stable character traits and thus epistemic virtues. I cannot discuss this objection here, but see (Alfano 2013, chapter 5, and Tanesini 2018, section 6).
5 This is closest to the view of Tanesini (2018), but I hope to capture at least the spirit of many other views (see footnote 5).The main outlier is Roberts and Woods's (2003) “low concern for status” view, which characterizes intellectual humility as not caring about the way in which others perceive your epistemic abilities. That said, low concern for status is often an outworking of intellectual humility as construed here (Whitcomb et al. 2017, 523).
6 Hazlett (2012) and Church (2016) limit the objects of evaluation to the epistemic statuses of the agent's beliefs, omitting other sorts of attitude and ability.Whitcomb et al. (2017) limit the objects of evaluation to the agent's cognitive limitations, omitting her strengths. I adopt Tanesini's view because it is the broadest: it includes the objects of evaluation highlighted by the others.
7 For example, Tanesini says that intellectual humility might be directed at beliefs, theories, cognitive capacities, habits, or skills (2018, 411—412), including one's vision and hearing (411), memory (412), or problem-solving ability (413). See also Whitcomb et al. (2017, 516).And note the claim of Church (2016) and Hazlett (2013) that intellectual humility is directed solely at the epistemic status of one's beliefs.
8 Some characterize these two vices as the extremes between which intellectual humility is the virtuous “mean” (Church 2016, 413—414; Hazlett 2012, 220;Whitcomb et al. 2017, 516—517). But Tanesini (2018, 418) cautions against this picture on the grounds that it is psychologically unrealistic: you don't correct for servility by adding doses of arrogance until you arrive at intellectual humility. Her complex catalogue of other vices opposed to intellectual humility also speaks against a one-scale model (Tanesini 2018c).
9 Or so I suppose here, in agreement with (Zagzebski 1996; Battaly 2016;Tanesini 2018a). For contrary arguments, to the effect that intellectual vice is compatible with epistemically good motivations, see (Cassam 2016; Crerar 2018).
10 These are distinguished from a cluster of related vices, such as intellectual haughtiness and timidity, in (Tanesini 2018c).
11 On closer inspection, Foley (2001), Zagzebski (2012), and Lehrer (1997) seem to construe self-trust as mere reliance on one's faculties, rather than as trust in the richer sense discussed here (Dormandy 2020).
12 This is so regardless of whether she is required merely to respond to any defeaters against trusting others, or to seek positive reasons to trust them.
13 Another response to distrusting yourself to pick testifiers is that you decline to trust any at all, which (if you are servile and distrust yourself too) will push you toward suspension of judgment on many matters. But this tendency is arguably not proper to intellectual servility, but to the closely related vice of intellectual timidity (Tanesini 2018c).
14 Many thanks to Alessandra Tanesini for helpful comments.
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