Intellectual humility

Let's turn now to the other element of the tension we are investigating: intellectual humility.

As the various discussions in this volume indicate, intellectual humility is a concept that is still very much under negotiation.^[1] [2] But the psychological phenomenon it describes has been widely discussed in philosophy.

Michel de Montaigne and David Hume recommended that inquiry be guided by it.The American philosopher John Dewey would have called it open-mindedness; the educational establishment sometimes calls it critical thinking. Moreover, it has very deep roots in philosophy. Its core elements are clearly highlighted by two central Socratic lessons—first, that the wise person recognizes what they don't know, and second, that wisdom can be gained by listening to others and engaging in dialogue with them.

The first of these lessons arises from Socrates' famous retort, upon being declared the wisest man in all of Athens by the Oracle of Delphi, that he only knew that he knew nothing. One has to acknowledge one's epistemic limitations, but there is arguably more to it than that. Mere recognition of one's limitations is not sufficient to be intellectually humble; the real point of the Socratic lesson is that we must own those limitations and be ready to act and respond in ways that are consistent with that fact. 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” (2015, 10). In other words, it is not enough to simply abstractly note one's flaws and then pass on unperturbed. One must be motivated to do something about it to the extent that one can.

This first aspect of intellectual humility, note, is self-directed. It concerns “knowing thyself” so to speak.

But recent discussions of the subject have also pointed out that another key feature of intellectual humility is other-directed (Priest, 2017). In particular, it involves a willingness to learn from others through our interactions with them.This, too, can be seen as a central Socratic lesson—to seek knowledge through dialogue. This second aspect of intellectual humility—the other-directed aspect—is a disposition to see your worldview as open to epistemic improvement from new evidence via the testimony of others (Lynch, 2018b).

This second aspect of intellectual humility is as important as the first. What it tells us is that being intellectually humble means more than admitting when you don't know, more than just owning your limitations.That could be done, after all, in isolation.The extremely intellectually arrogant person might admit they've made a mistake but think that they alone can rectify it. In contrast, having intellectual humility involves the realization that others might have something to teach you, that there may be something to gain from the experience of other people. The intellectually humble person is willing to show basic epistemic respect to others—to see them as fellow participants in a game of giving and asking for reasons as it is sometimes put (Lynch, 2019). And that is also what makes intellectual humility so important for democracy. As Dewey argued throughout his career, successful democratic politics requires constant work.We must work at mutual respect, and to do that we must work at listening and learning—to try to be open-minded, to be free “from prejudice, partisanship, and other such habits that close the mind and make it unwilling to consider new problems and entertain new ideas”.¹³

To sum up, intellectual humility can be understood as having two components, self-regarding and other-regarding. A person is intellectually humble to the extent that she

Intellectual humility is clearly a psychological phenomenon.

But of what kind? Alessandra Tanesini (2016) has influentially argued that intellectual humility is best understood as a complex psycho-social attitude.An “attitude” in this context is a directed mental state with a positive or negative orientation. It is, as we might say, a kind of mental orientation. Intellectual humility, and its contrasting attitude, intellectual arrogance, are in this sense like neighboring attitudes such as contempt, appreciation or resentment.What makes intellectual humility especially interesting for our purposes, however, is that, like curiosity, it is a properly epistemic attitude. That's because it is, at least in part, directed at our beliefs and their epistemic position.

Like any attitude, intellectual humility is internally related to a network of other attitudes and mental states. As a properly epistemic attitude, it necessarily involves caring about believing what's true. As such, and as our Socratic allusions suggest, it is an attitude that is at the heart of science and philosophy. Perhaps more surprisingly, it is also an attitude that requires confidence. Intellectual humility is not timidity in belief. And it is not the attitude of skepticism—at least, where that is understood to mean doubting that you know anything at all. In order to adopt Socratic humility, you can't be overly concerned about your ego. But that doesn't mean you lack an ego; you just don't put your ego before truth.To be open to learning from others, you need to be confident enough to realize what you know, and what you don't.

Neither is intellectual humility the same as intellectual servility. It isn't a matter of abasing yourself or seeing yourself as lower than others. It is not about giving up your convictions just because others, or the majority, think you must. As Socrates's own life makes plain, the pursuit of truth and the combating of arrogance often put you into conflict with those in power, simply because those in power are often the ones most resistant to challenging their convictions.

And that, of course, raises the uncomfortable questions at the heart of this essay. What we have to confront is whether intellectual humility is also an attitude we can have toward our own convictions.³

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

Intellectual humility

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