Intellectual humility

Intellectual humility is an epistemic character virtue. As such it is a stable trait of a person's cognitive character.⁴ The intellectually humble agent has two features, one marking him as epis- temically virtuous in general, the other as intellectually humble specifically.

The general feature is this: the intellectually humble person is epistemically motivated (Baehr 2011; Roberts and Wood 2003; Church 2016;Whitcomb et al. 2017;Tanesini 2018b).That is, he cares about achieving epistemic aims such as knowledge, and this is what motivates his cognitive behav­ior. One corollary of being epistemically motivated is that the intellectually humble person is disposed to strive for epistemic self-improvement for its own sake.This is not to say that intellec­tually humble agents cannot have other aims in their cognitive activities (such as career-advance­ment in a field that prizes epistemic prowess), only that these cannot be their sole or primary aims.

The specifically distinguishing feature of the intellectually humble agent is that he is disposed to form largely accurate evaluations of his own epistemic strengths and weaknesses.⁵ A few clarifications are in order. First, intellectual humility is directed toward the agent himself. In this it can be contrasted with other virtues, such as epistemic charity or open-mindedness, that are directed toward others.

Second, views differ over the precise form of the epistemic self-evaluations involved in intel­lectual humility. Hazlett (2012) says that they are evaluative beliefs, whereas Church (2016) holds, more generally, that they involve “accurately tracking” one's epistemic state.Whitcomb et al. (2017) say that the evaluations are states of“recognition” (522), whereas Tanesini (2018) con­strues them as valenced attitudes, such as like or dislike, that could, but need not, be articulated in terms of evaluations.

More important for present purposes, third, is what these evaluations are evaluations of. Some views construe their objects more narrowly than others; I will follow Tanesini (2018), who construes them the most broadly, as all “aspects of the subject's cognitive agency” (410).The objects of evaluation thus include the agent's own cognitive abilities and limitations, his cogni­tive achievements and failures, as well as his beliefs.⁶ Much of the literature reads as if intellectual humility concerns itself only with one's purely intellectual features.⁷ But we must remember that knowledge acquisition is strongly influenced by our affections and volition.Their influence might be direct, supposing that emotions or desires can simply bring about beliefs; whether or not they can, they certainly exert indirect influence, as when an emotion or a desire influences what a person attends to or ignores, or “colors” his perception of some event, thereby nudging him to form a particular belief on its basis. Epistemic self-evaluation, then, must at times include emotional and volitional self-evaluation, at least insofar as these states influence one's cognition. This observation will prove important in our discussion below of the relationship between intellectual humility and epistemic trust and trustworthiness, for these, as we saw, have not only intellectual, but also emotional and volitional elements. I will refer to the objects of the intel­lectually humble agent's epistemic self-evaluation as his noetic faculties.

Fourth, the intellectually humble person's epistemic self-evaluations tend, at least in benign epistemic contexts, to be accurate (Tanesini 2018, 414; Whitcomb et al. 2017; Church 2016). That is, if she evaluates some feature of her noetic system, she does so accurately, and does not fail to evaluate any feature that matters for a given case (or at least, she does not fail to form the requisite affective attitude that would naturally give rise to an evaluation).

We may contrast intellectual humility with two intellectual vices: intellectual arrogance and intellectual servility.⁸ As with intellectual humility, there is one feature (I will suppose) that marks them as vices, and another singling them out as the specific vices that they are.The gen­eral feature is this: intellectually arrogant or servile agents are not epistemically motivated.⁹ Their noetic behavior is instead motivated exclusively by other things, such as the desire to advance their career in a field that prizes knowledge.As a result, intellectually arrogant or servile agents are not disposed to strive for epistemic self-improvement, at least not for its own sake.

What makes these vices counterparts to intellectual humility is their second distinguishing feature. Like intellectual humility, both are directed toward the agent himself, specifically toward his own epistemic strengths and weaknesses. But whereas the intellectually humble agent is disposed to form accurate self-evaluations, intellectually arrogant or servile agents are disposed to form inaccurate ones. More specifically, the intellectually arrogant agent is disposed to excessively high evaluations of her own noetic strengths in acquiring knowledge, and excessively low evaluations of her weaknesses in this area; and the servile agent is disposed to inaccuracy in the other direction: to an exces­sively low evaluation of his noetic strengths in acquiring knowledge, and a high evaluation of his relevant weaknesses.¹⁰ In other words, the intellectually arrogant agent is apt to think that she is better at securing knowledge than she is, whereas the servile agent is apt to think that he is worse than he is (Whitcomb et al. 2017, 526; Church 2016, 413-414; Hazlett 2012, 220;Tanesini 2018, 418;).

Because the vices of intellectual arrogance and intellectual servility have these characteris­tics, they tend to be epistemically detrimental in standard circumstances - that is, they tend to impede the acquisition of knowledge.

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