Deliberative virtues

Another argumentative context in which the virtue of intellectual humility has been explicitly invoked is the analysis of group deliberation. Scott Aikin and Caleb Clanton have argued that success in group deliberation, and thereby in democratic forms of political decision making, depends on the individual participants manifesting what they call “group-deliberative virtues” (Aikin and Clanton, 2010, p.

413). They stress that such virtues differ from epistemic virtues since they are not just truth-conducive, but also “conducive to cooperation and good sentiments among the deliberators in a group” (Aikin and Clanton, 2010, p. 421). Of course, such well-conducted deliberation may in turn be more likely to settle on the truth. One of Aikin and Clanton's virtues is deliberative humility, which they define as “the willingness to hold one's view fallibly and in such a way as to admit that one might be shown to be wrong in light of better reasons, evidence, and argument” (Aikin and Clanton, 2010, p. 419). They situate deliberative humility as a mean between two vices they term “deliberative hubris” and “deliberative insecurity”: the former “the unwillingness to even consider that one's view could be refined or refuted by others”, the latter “the inability to think that one could ever be on target about an issue” (Aikin and Clanton, 2010, p. 420). This approach to humility bears an obvious similarity to Kidd's confidence management account. Aikin and Clanton go further than Kidd, however, in arguing that the “epistemic norm of humility is. embedded in the very practice of holding any belief whatsoever”, since to hold a belief is to be willing to defend it, and to defend it adequately is to give a fair hearing to such challenges as may be raised against it (ibid.).² This makes intellectual humility pivotal to the practice of group deliberation: without it deliberation cannot be expected to proceed in good faith, but with it belief in all but the safest of claims ought, at least in principle, to lead to group deliberation.

The political scientist Kyle Scott takes this point further, arguing that Aikin and Clanton's seven other deliberative virtues (deliberative wit, friendliness, empathy, charity, temperance, courage, and sincerity) all critically depend on humility, which makes humility essential for group deliberation, and thereby for any feasible concept of deliberative democracy (Scott, 2014, p. 230).

There is some empirical support for these positive conclusions about the value of intellectual humility for deliberation. There is, as one recent survey has it, an embarrassment of riches in the empirical measurement of humility (McElroy-Heltzel et al., 2018).That survey compares 22 different measures, of which four are specifically measures of intellectual humility (McElroy et al., 2014; Hoyle et al., 2016; Krumrei-Mancuso and Rouse, 2016; Leary et al., 2017). Yet more such measures have been published since the data collection period of this survey (Alfano et al., 2017; Haggard et al., 2018; Porter and Schumann, 2018). For example, the psychologists Tenelle Porter and Karina Schumann have developed one of the simpler measures of intellectual humility, consisting of an inventory of nine questions, each to be answered on a sevenpoint Likert scale (Porter and Schumann, 2018, p. 143). This includes both positively worded questions, such as “I am willing to admit it if I don't know something” and “I like to compliment others on their intellectual strengths”, and (reverse scored) negatively worded questions, such as “I feel uncomfortable when someone points out one of my intellectual shortcomings” and “I don't like it when someone points out an intellectual mistake that I made”. Porter and Schumann's factor analysis suggests that this measure is one-dimensional, in contrast with some other studies (for example, Alfano et al., 2017; Haggard et al., 2018, whose studies yielded four and three factors, respectively). Porter and Schumann found that “participants who were higher in intellectual humility were more respectful of and more interested in trying to learn about opposing perspectives” both in classroom debates and on emotive public policy issues, such as gun control or same-sex marriage (Porter and Schumann, 2018, pp.

145 ff.).They also demonstrated that “those higher in intellectual humility read a greater proportion (and higher number) of opposing vs. matching reasons than those lower in intellectual humility” (Porter and Schumann, 2018, p. 153). Other studies using different measures have found similar results. For example, Elizabeth Krumrei-Mancuso and colleagues found that intellectual humility “was associated with more reflective thinking, need for cognition, intellectual engagement, intellectual curiosity, intellectual openness, and open-minded thinking” and “also associated with less social vigilantism, which may promote collaborative and cooperative learning” (Krumrei- Mancuso et al., 2020, p. 168).The results of these studies are consistent with Aikin and Clanton's conclusion that intellectual humility in participants is a crucial, perhaps indispensable, asset in group deliberation.

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Source: Alfano Mark, Lynch Michael P.. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Humility. Routledge,2020. — 514 p.. 2020

Deliberative virtues

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