Intellectual humility

Intellectual humility is typically construed as something like the virtuous mean between intel­lectual arrogance and intellectual diffidence. Broadly speaking, the intellectually humble person is one who accurately assesses their intellectual strengths and weaknesses, and who is aware that their beliefs could be mistaken—even when those beliefs are deeply held, and on emotive topics like religion and politics (Church and Samuelson 2017, 2).When we lack intellectual humility, we’re less likely to be open to revising our beliefs in light of new evidence, and less likely to work on improving problematic aspects of our intellectual character—and, thus, more likely to be led to error in our inquiries.

There are now a range of competing accounts of intellectual humility, all of which interpret the above core ideas in a slightly different way. On the underestimation view (e.g., Driver 1989), intellectual humility is chiefly about underestimating one's intellectual strengths, accomplish­ments, social status and entitlements. On the low concern for status view (e.g., Roberts and Wood 2007), intellectual humility disposes one to have low concern for one's status and social stand- ing.The proper belief view (e.g., Church and Samuelson 2017), by contrast, says that intellectual humility requires valuing one's beliefs as one ought to, and holding accurate beliefs about the epistemic status of one's own beliefs. By contrast, the interpersonal account (e.g., Priest 2017) maintains that intellectual humility requires “not [seeing oneself] as intellectually entitled” (p. 479)—a trait that allows one to help others achieve intellectual improvement by treating their intellects with the same respect one accords to oneself.

Finally, according to what is perhaps the most well-known account of intellectual humil­ity—and one that we'll be drawing from in several places in what follows (e.g., Section 29.4.1)—the limitations-owning account (Whitcomb, Battaly, Baehr, and Howard-Snyder 2015) maintains that what's central to intellectual humility is being “appropriately attentive to” and “owning” one's intellectual limitations (2015, p. 516). Connecting this account of intellectual humility with issues related to norms of assertion (as we shall do in Section 29.4.1) requires clarifying the three main concepts referred to in their account—namely, (1) being appropri­ately attentive, (2) owning and (3) intellectual limitations. Firstly, to be attentive in Whitcomb et al.'s sense, one has to have a disposition for one's limitations to come to mind when it's appropriate to the context—this appropriate attentiveness is to be contrasted with oblivious­ness to limitations on the one hand, and obsession with limitations on the other. Secondly, to own one's limitations is to be disposed to have a range of appropriate cognitive, behavioural, motivational and affective responses to the aforementioned awareness of limitations. Thirdly, the nature of the relevant limitations is illuminated by examples provided by Whitcomb et al. (p. 516)—they discuss gaps in knowledge (e.g., ignorance of the political landscape), cognitive mistakes (e.g., forgetting to meet someone), unreliable processes (e.g., poor memory), deficits in learnable skills (e.g., being bad at spelling), and intellectual character flaws (e.g., frequently jumping to conclusions).

Accordingly, on the limitations-owning account, one is intellectually humble when one is properly attentive to and owns one's intellectual limitations—and, presumably, one is virtuously intellectually humble when one does this because one is appropriately motivated to pursue epistemic goods (e.g., truth, knowledge and understanding).

Having summarised some of the main perspectives on intellectual humility, we now turn to the debate about the epistemic norms governing assertion. From there, we will be well placed to consider some of the demands that virtuous intellectual humility places on our practice of asserting.

29.3