Intellectual humility and epistemic trust in others

We have seen that intellectual humility promotes effective epistemic self-trust. I will now argue that it also helps epistemic trust in other people to be effective. The paradigm case that I will focus on is a testimonial relationship, in which one person, the speaker, tells something to another, the hearer, thereby purporting to make knowledge available (Goldberg, unpublished manuscript) and inviting him to trust her for it (Hinchman 2005).The exchange might be over in an instant, as when one person tells another something that she knows off the top of her head, or it could extend over time, as when she promises to research something and get back to him.

25.4.1 The intellectually humble hearer of testimony

Trusting another person for knowledge is in some ways like trusting oneself for it, and in other ways different. It is similar in that what makes it effective is the trustee's willingness and com­petence. It is different in that the trustee is another person, so you must gauge these things at a remove (Fricker 2006). Whereas the epistemic self-truster needs accurate evaluations of his own noetic faculties, the epistemic truster of others needs accurate evaluations of others.'¹² Intellectual humility, a virtue of self-evaluation, is tailor-made for the epistemic self-truster. But it will not help the epistemic truster of others in the same way, since evaluating others' noetic faculties is not its remit. For help in choosing which speakers to trust, he must cultivate other virtues.

Yet there are a few ways in which intellectual humility can nevertheless be useful to a pro­spective hearer of testimony. First, because it puts him in a good position to recognize when trusting himself for knowledge would be effective and when not, it helps him recognize when he should seek outside epistemic assistance as opposed to trusting himself.

Second, intellectual humility puts the hearer in a position to recognize his own strengths and weaknesses in assessing others' epistemic merits.That is, it helps him know when he can safely trust himself in choosing his testifiers. He might for example realize that he is better at doing this in some domains or social contexts than others, or that he is biased with regard to certain types of testifier, prompting him spontaneously to up- or down-grade their testimony.

Third, intellectual humility disposes the hearer to improve his testifier-selecting abilities —for example to cultivate the relevant virtues, to re-train his biases through seeking counter-instances to them, and so forth.

So even though intellectual humility cannot directly help a hearer choose his testifiers, it can help him indirectly.

Contrast this with intellectually arrogant or servile hearers.As for the arrogant hearer, we saw that such a person overestimates her noetic strengths at knowledge acquisition and underestimates her noetic weaknesses, leading to an excessive readiness to trust herself.As a hearer of testimony, this person faces two pitfalls. First, she will incline toward trusting herself when it would be wiser to trust knowledgeable others. Second, even when she does opt to delegate a cognitive task to others, her intellectual arrogance will still get in the way. For the abilities that she over­estimates include her abilities to gauge whom to trust for knowledge, making her apt to trust herself too readily on the topic of which others to trust. She may thus wind up trusting speakers who are not in fact trustworthy. One danger is that she will trust only those whose testimony coheres with her own worldview, fostering cognitive entrenchment. Intellectual arrogance, then, is an epistemic stumbling block for a hearer of testimony.

The intellectually servile hearer has the converse problem. As we saw, this person underesti­mates his noetic strengths in knowledge acquisition and overestimates his noetic weaknesses, not trusting himself readily enough, and perhaps actively distrusting himself.

In summary, intellectual humility disposes someone in search of testimonial knowledge to invest his epistemic trust effectively. It does not help him assess others' epistemic merits, but it helps him recognize when he needs outside assistance, how able he is to discern whom to trust for knowledge, and it disposes him to improve his testifier-selecting abilities. Intellectual arro­gance and intellectual servility, by contrast, promote ineffective epistemic trust in others.

25.4.2 The intellectually humble speaker of testimony

Let's turn to the speaker, in her capacity as trustee for knowledge. I will argue that intellectual humility fosters epistemic trustworthiness — that is, it fosters willingness and competence.

Consider first willingness, which, to recall, includes willingness to abide by the norms of the trust relationship, and willingness to experience the characteristic psychology of trust. Intellectual humility promotes both. The intellectually humble person, as we saw, is motivated to pursue epistemic aims for their own sake; this surely includes social-epistemic aims, where the person gaining knowledge is someone other than herself.

Let's turn to competence. Recall that this amounts to competence to form one's own knowl­edge on the matter at issue, and competence to communicate to the hearer the knowledge that he needs in his context.We may call these knowledge and communicative competences, respectively. Intellectual humility encourages knowledge competence: it ensures that the speaker is motivated to promote epistemic ends, with the corollary that she is motivated to epistemically self-improve for the sake of doing so.This does not guarantee that her efforts will succeed, but it certainly promotes success.

What about communicative competence? To see how intellectual humility fosters this, we need a closer look at what it involves. There are three components. One is (a) competence to testify only if one has knowledge. Since testifying is a form of asserting, this competence amounts to the speaker's being able to obey a plausible norm of assertion: to assert only what she knows (Williamson 2000, chapter 11).A speaker who cannot obey this norm cannot be trusted to refrain from asserting things that she does not know — a disaster for a hearer trusting her for knowledge. The next component of communicative competence is: (b) competence to accept the hearer's trust for knowledge only if she is willing to fulfill it; that is, willing to subject herself to the norms of trust and to experience its characteristic psychology. For example, if her jealousy toward the speaker is prone to sapping her commitment to doing her best for him, she must rec­ognize this and perhaps decline his trust.A speaker who cannot accurately gauge her willingness to come through for a hearer is a risky bet. Finally, (c) the speaker must be competent to discern what sort of information the hearer needs in his context (Hinchman 2012, Grasswick 2018). For example, if he asks for directions to the post office and is pushing a baby carriage, she should not direct him in the way that would be simplest for someone traveling light, say, up a flight of stairs.

Intellectual humility fosters each of these communicative competences. (a) The intellectu­ally humble speaker is well placed to know what she knows and does not know, and hence to testify only what she knows (Whitcomb et al. 2017, 522).This arises from the distinguish­ing feature of intellectual humility, the tendency to form accurate noetic self-evaluations. (b) For the same reason, the intellectually humble speaker likely has the self-insight to recognize whether she is willing to come through for the hearer, and hence whether she can in good faith accept his epistemic trust. As for the third communicative competence, (c) discerning the particular information that the hearer needs in his context, intellectual humility does not, itself, involve this. For this competence is other-directed, whereas intellectual humility (as we saw) is directed toward oneself. But because intellectual humility, being a virtue, stems from an epis­temic motivation, it ensures that the speaker is motivated to develop competence in discerning hearers' epistemic needs.

In summary, intellectual humility promotes willingness in the speaker, in that it motivates her to meet the hearer's epistemic aims; and it promotes competence by equipping her to be a good knower and a good communicator.

Contrast this with intellectually arrogant and servile speakers, who have several features that make them bad bets for epistemic trustworthiness. One feature puts pressure on their willingness to come through for the hearer: neither the arrogant nor the servile speaker is characteristically motivated to achieve epistemic aims — either their own or the hearer's — for their own sake.This does not automatically mean that they will be less willing to come through for the hearer. But it does mean that they will need a substitute motivation, and that this motivation must be robust, not dependent on changeable circumstantial factors.The wise hearer, if he is to trust an arrogant or servile speaker at all, would thus do well to ensure that she has some such motivation.

But even then, arrogant and servile speakers also get low marks for competence. Consider, first, knowledge competence. The intellectually arrogant person, as we saw, is apt to form too many beliefs, of which a significant proportion could easily be false or unfounded.And the ser­vile person is apt to form his own beliefs gullibly, as well as to miss out on corrective feedback that might otherwise sharpen his knowledge. So neither the arrogant nor the servile speaker is apt to have knowledge competence, making neither worthy of epistemic trust.

Let's turn to commitment competence. The intellectually arrogant speaker has two features that sap it. One is that she is apt to testify even in the absence of knowledge, failing with respect to aspect (a) of communicative competence, and the other is that she is apt to accept the hearer's trust even if her will to deliver for him is weak, failing with respect to aspect (b). The reason is that, because the arrogant speaker overestimates her noetic strengths and underestimates her noetic weaknesses, she is prone to thinking that she has what it takes to come through for the hearer even if she does not.

The intellectually servile speaker does not have this problem with communicative com­petence, for he underestimates his abilities. Rather than being prone to accept the hearer's trust when he shouldn't, he is prone to declining it when he would be competent to deliver on it after all. Because, in general, a greater proportion of his (comparatively rare) testimony is apt to constitute knowledge than the arrogant speaker's, trusting him for knowledge might be thought a less dangerous bet for the hearer than trusting an arrogant speaker. However, if servility (as Tanesini 2018c argues) is motivated by the desire for social acceptance, trusting a servile speaker may risk being told what he thinks you want to hear, whether or not it is true.

Neither arrogant nor servile speakers, then, are epistemically wise choices for prospective hearers. An intellectually humble speaker, by contrast, is in a good place to be epistemically trustworthy, so that trusting her for knowledge is likely to be effective.

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