Humility
It is familiar from Aristotelian ethics to conceive of humility as a virtue. Indeed, Aristotle says, “with regard to honor and dishonor, the mean is proper pride, the excess is known as a sort of empty vanity, and the deficiency is undue humility” (Aristotle, 1999, p.
29). Proper pride, which we might also understand as proper (or due) humility, is the virtuous golden mean between vices of deficiency and excess.As one would expect, there has been much philosophical discus-sion of Aristotle’s understanding of humility. Many of the more recent discussions of humility have focused on intellectual humility. That is, humility regarding one’s intellectual or epistemic standing. For the purposes of this paper, I’ll take this kind of humility as my focus.
Intellectual humility is a concept in progress. Philosophers and psychologists are in the process of defining and coming to understand what intellectual humility is and what place it has in our theories (Church and Samuelson, 2016; Hazlett, 2012; Kidd, 2016; Lynch, 2018a;Whitcomb, Battaly, Baehr, and Howard-Snyder, 2017).1 Robert Roberts and Jay Wood, for example argue that intellectual humility is or involves a disposition to be unconcerned with the social status that results from the recognition of one’s epistemic prowess (Roberts and Wood, 2007). Ian Church and Peter Samuelson, on the other hand, argue for what they call the doxastic account. According to the doxastic account, the intellectually humble person accurately tracks what she could non- culpably take the positive epistemic status of her beliefs to be (Church and Samuelson, 2016). The precise nature of intellectual humility is contentious, but it is widely agreed that it involves, or is closely related to, a recognition of the limits of one’s own knowledge and experience.
A third prominent view, defended by Whitcomb et al., holds that we must own our limitations, rather than simply recognize them (Whitcomb et al., 2017).
Owning one’s own limitations involves a complex set of attitudes. As Whitcomb et al. put it, “owning an intellectual limitation consists in a dispositional profile that includes cognitive, behavioral, motivational, and affective responses to an awareness of one’s limitations” (Whitcomb et al., 2017, p. 518). The intellectually humble person is disposed to believe that she has limitations, to admit those limitations to herself and others, to care about those limitations when relevant, and to affectively respond to her limitations as appropriate in various contexts. Intellectual humility, on this account, is a fairly complex psychological disposition. Knowing someone is intellectually humble puts us in a position to anticipate various behaviors and attitudes she might also hold. Because this account involves more than mere recognition of limitations, but also responses to those limitations, we have greater understanding of the intellectually humble person. For these reasons, this is the account of intellectual humility that I will take on board for the purposes of this chapter. However, my conclusions should follow, modulo some changes, for at least some other accounts of intellectual humility.2We might come to own our limitations in the ways necessary for intellectual humility from learning about cognitive biases, like confirmation bias, implicit bias, and various aliefs3 (Gendler, 2011). It might come from the realization that we are prone to rate ourselves as much less biased than we in fact are (Uhlmann and Cohen, 2007).4 Or it might come from comparing one’s own experience with testimonial evidence of the experiences of others (Johnson, 2017).
An intellectually humble person, then, would reflect on her own epistemic position and would own both the strengths and the limitations of that position. She would also weigh those strengths and weaknesses appropriately. She would also be more likely to have other related attitudes and responses. In particular, we would expect her to have certain attitudes toward others. If an agent is aware of her limitations, and is disposed to care about them, and react affectively to them as appropriate, then we’d expect her exchanges with others to go in particular ways. Being intellectually humble would make her more likely to be empathetic with those with whom she has deep disagreement, as well as more curious about the positions of those whose views are different from her own. I’ll argue for each of these in the next two sections.
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