Intellectual humility and curiosity
In addition to making it more likely that an agent is empathetic with deeply different persons, humility also facilitates the development of curiosity. Curiosity has received recent attention in moral psychology and virtue epistemology (Inan, 2013; Inan, Watson,Whitcomb, and Yigit, 2018).
Curiosity, like humility, is conceived as an intellectual virtue (Ross, n.d.;Watson, n.d.).Following Lani Watson's treatment of curiosity, let us understand curiosity as involving motivation to acquire epistemic goods (Watson, 2018). A virtuously curious person, then, has the proper motivation to acquire epistemic goods.We would expect her to ask good questions and seek salient, well-justified information. A deficiently curious person might lack interest or be blissfully ignorant.We would expect her to rarely ask questions, or to only ask redundant questions affirming what she already knows. An excessively curious person would then be nosy or prying. Her questions would likely be inappropriate or ill-conceived. My claim is that intellectual humility facilitates proper curiosity.
Intellectual humility has already been linked with curiosity. In their study of the semantic dimensions of intellectual humility, Christensen et al. performed a psycholexical analysis of ordinary speakers' associations with intellectual humility.This analysis demonstrated that curiosity, and a cluster of related concepts like inquiry, and learning, were associated with intellectual humility.These concepts weren't at the core, however, the authors took their results to be,“rep- resentative of the notion that an intellectually humble person will be open and responsive to new ideas and information” (Christen, Robinson, and Alfano, 2014, p. 5).
My conjecture, though, is that this relationship plausibly goes beyond conceptual associa- tion.As I've said, it seems likely that being intellectually humble could facilitate curiosity.
Here's how that would go: imagine Annie, who is a total novice regarding, say, floriculture. If Annie is intellectually humble, she will own her own epistemic limitations. If Annie owns her own epistemic limitations, she will be aware that there is a distance between her epistemic position with respect to floriculture and the epistemic position of a floriculture expert. Annie's awareness of this distance, and the motivation she is disposed to have regarding her limitations, makes her better able to ask questions, when presented with an expert in the right context.What she doesn't know will be salient to her, allowing her to properly pursue knowledge — allowing her to be curious.To see this more clearly, contrast Annie's case with two others: consider Bev, who is intellectually arrogant, and Cal, who is intellectually servile. Bev is not sufficiently aware of her epistemic limitations.This means that she fails to ask relevant questions, fails to attend to information that could improve her epistemic position, and fails to acquire epistemic goods. She is not curious because she fails to identify relevant lacunae in her belief set. Bev's intellectual arrogance keeps her from attending to her limitations, so keeps her from being curious.
Cal, on the other hand, takes himself to be far more epistemically limited than he is. So while he might be highly motivated to seek information, at least some of the information he seeks will be confirmation of beliefs he already holds or information he's already had access to. He doubts his own beliefs, or the justification for them, and so his motivation to seek information is not properly directed — he fails to be motivated to acquire epistemic goods, as he is motivated to re-cover the same ground.
Annie, because she is intellectually humble, is better positioned than either Bev or Cal to be properly motivated to seek epistemic goods. Her intellectual humility facilitates her virtuous curiosity.
Several objections might arise here.
First, it might be argued that Annie might be intellectually humble but still not motivated to seek epistemic goods. It is, after all, perfectly coherent for Annie to be aware that she doesn't know much about floriculture, be in a context in which floriculture is relevant, and yet still not be motivated to acquire floriculture information. This might be because Annie is distracted, or tired, or simply not that interested in floriculture. She might hope never to be in a similar context again. In this case she is intellectually humble, but not virtuously curious.Similarly, one might argue that Cal and Bev, despite failing to be intellectually humble, are still able to be virtuously curious. Bev could still be unmotivated to acquire epistemic goods even despite being aware of her limitations. Indeed, she might seek new information and then respond, “oh, I already knew that”, or “that was just obvious".We've all met people who respond to novel information in this way, and they are paradigmatically, intellectually arrogant. These arrogant responses to new information don't, in principle, keep Bev from being properly curious. She might be deeply and overly confident in her own epistemic prowess, but still be appropriately motivated to seek new information. Cal, too, could be properly curious, but fail to own his own abilities and epistemic qualifications. Indeed, Cal might happen to (by accident) only inquire about those areas in which he is in fact epistemically limited. He overestimates or is overly concerned with his own limitations, but nonetheless, happens to be appropriately curious.8
I agree that these are perfectly possible cases, however, they are not counter examples to my claim. Intellectual humility is not the same as curiosity, nor does it guarantee that an agent will be curious. It further is not necessary for proper curiosity. My claim is only that owning her own limitations better positions an agent to be motivated to seek further epistemic goods. And we would have to do some empirical work to see if this claim could be fortified by data.
As with the above discussion of empathy, my claim is, to some extent, empirical.We would want to have more data from psychologists working on characteristics like intellectual humility and curiosity. Until then, my claim can be, at best, a going hypothesis. It is an attractive hypothesis, however, given that we are interested in cultivating tolerance of diverse ideas. In the next section, I will explore the connection between the virtues I've been discussing so far and tolerance of diverse ideas.
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