Convictions with humility

As we noted at the outset, we are concerned with two questions. The first is modal: whether passionate conviction is even possible for a person who is intellectually humble. The second is normative: whether we should be intellectually humble about our convictions.

Our first question itself conceals two separate issues: whether we can we be intellectually humble and have convictions and whether we can be intellectually humble about our convictions.

With regard to the first issue, the answer is a clear “yes”. Indeed, there are reasons to think one could not be intellectually humble without convictions.

Here's why. Convictions, I've argued, both reflect and compose our self-identity—the kind of person we aspire to be. It is an open question whether and how human beings can fail to possess a self-identity. It is certainly logically possible, and it seems to also be psychologically possible. To fail to have a self-identity would be to fail to have any cares or commitments; it would mean not identifying with anything or anyone—even one's self-interest (after all, self-absorption is still a self-identity). Such people may well exist, and if they do, they lack convictions. But as a result, they will also lack the capacity to care about either their limitations or improving their worldview via the evidence. Nor, presumably, would they be particularly wedded to their own opinions.They wouldn't be arrogant; but neither could they be intellectually humble.

What all this tells us is that intellectual humility is not an opponent of just having convic- tions.To be open to improvement you must have a base to improve on.As Dewey remarked, this kind of attitude is “very different from empty-mindedness.While it is hospitality to new themes, facts, ideas, questions, it is not the kind of hospitality that would be indicated by hanging out a sign: ‘Come right in; there is nobody at home'” (Dewey, 1986, 136).

We will return to this point below. But for now let's turn to the second, and harder, ques­tion: whether we can be intellectually humble about our convictions.This is a variant of a puzzle sometimes raised about open-mindedness and full belief. As Wayne Riggs introduces it:

It would seem that only a lack of full confidence in one's beliefs could lead one to spend any time or effort considering views that conflict with one's own. Indeed, full confidence in one's beliefs would seem to render the attitude of open-mindedness irrational.

(Riggs, 2010, 177)

Intuitively, the same problem appears to arise with regard to intellectual humility as well. How can one regard one's worldview as open to epistemic improvement from others' views while still remaining committed to that worldview?

One thought right off the bat is that one might be intellectually humble about one's world­view without thinking that a specific commitment within it needs revision. Thus, as Adler has suggested, we might see intellectual humility as involving a second-order “doubt about the perfection of one's believing, not a doubt about the truth of any specific belief” (2004, 310). Applied here, the thought is that the intellectually humble person, with respect to her beliefs, is much like the inspector at a factory, who checks the widgets that come down the line, not because he has any particular doubts about any specific widget, but because of a general policy to check the widgets. He may be fully convinced, prior to inspection, that a given widget will be error-free.

But we must be careful about the analogy. For much depends on why our faithful inspector (a) is convinced that a particular widget will be blemish-free; and (b) why he thinks that he should nonetheless inspect that widget. Much depends on the former because our inspector might think that a given widget must be blemish-free because he thinks God tells him that every third widget he sees on Tuesdays always will be, and that's the widget he happens to be examining at the moment.

Analogously, a person who holds a belief irrationally or dogmatically in the first place may be doing so only because he is intellectually arrogant about his beliefs with regard to some subject, and so unwilling to consider seriously anyone else's opinions. If so, then questions of intellectual humility are by the board in any event. And he might only be willing to carry on taking objec­tions seriously only because he has been convinced to do so for political reasons.

Now, I'm all for people being convinced for political reasons to take objections seriously. I wish more people were more convinced of the importance of political tolerance and the politi­cal value of the space of reasons. But if that is the only reason (as opposed to one among many) you are motivated to take objections seriously, then you are not acting out of intellectual humil­ity, because you lack an epistemic motivation.

In order for the analogy to succeed, we must therefore think of the inspector as having a particular motivation. We must see him as following the policy to inspect the widgets at least partly because he knows that the assembly line is not perfect. Hence, he regards the plurality of widgets that are produced by this particular line (as opposed to any particular one widget) as possibly flawed in some way or other. Similarly, then, with intellectual humility. Intellectual humility, as we noted above, is intrinsically connected to a commitment to believing what's true. As such, one who has that attitude toward some aspect of their worldview is disposed to consider beliefs that fall under that aspect as open to epistemic improvement, and thus also possibly flawed, or the product of biases or limitations on his part.To be so disposed is to regard a plurality of com­mitments held by a particular epistemic agent as fallible, not to regard any particular commitment as unjustified or possibly false.

So it seems plausible that one can be intellectually humble about one's convictions consid­ered as a plurality. But can we be intellectually humble about a particular conviction? Here, I think, we already have our answer: it is possible, but it will normally signal that the agent in question is already in, or about to enter, a reflective state about their self-identity.And such reflection, in turn, may well signal that the agent is shifting from treating the issue as a matter of conviction to treating it as a matter of belief.

As I noted above, to the extent that one's commitment to a proposition is a full conviction, and therefore reflective of one's self-identity, to that extent it will be psychologically extremely difficult to see it as open to revision. A conviction is not merely a confident belief that some proposition is true. Convictions are so deeply embedded into who and what we are that doubt­ing them, or even seeing them as improvable, is to reveal oneself as less than fully committed, and thus to doubt your very self-identity. But of course, it is not impossible to change one's convictions.We all know this, if not personal experience, then from experience with the human condition in general. But changing your convictions also means modifying one's vision of one­self, it means modifying your self-identity.That is a process required if one is to change and grow, morally or otherwise, but it is also a process that normally takes time. It can, and often does hap­pen gradually over the course of living, adopting new customs, moving to a new place, speak­ing a different language or falling in love.The gradual nature of these processes can mean that changes in our self-identity happen largely without explicit conscious attention. But not wholly so. No change in our aspirational vision of what kind of person we are can be wholly without an impact, on our conscious decisions about how to represent ourselves to both ourselves and others. And such decisions require some level of conscious awareness, as when one realizes one can, after college, no longer support all the same values one had adopted during your earlier life.

This raises the difficult further question of the relationship between reflection about our convictions and intellectual humility (see Williams, 1985). It may be, for example, that being intellectually humble about a particular conviction (or convictions) is a precursor to reflection; or it may be that it is, in other cases, a by-product. Both possibilities seem plausible, but I will not explore them further here. Instead, I will now turn to the question of when such reflection, and intellectual humility about one's convictions, is warranted, and when it is not.⁴

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