Intellectual humility has something important in common with trust: both, independently, help secure knowledge. But they also do so in tandem, and this chapter discusses how.

Intellectual humility is a virtue of a person's cognitive character; this means that it disposes her to perceive and think in certain ways that help promote knowledge.Trust is a form of cooperation, in which one person depends on another (or on herself) for some end, in a way that is governed by certain norms.

Epistemic trust is trust for epistemic ends, where the one that I will focus on here is knowledge.When the parties to an epistemic-trust relationship exhibit intellectual humility, I will argue, they are in a better position than otherwise to secure knowledge. Some think that this is true trivially, on the grounds that knowledge (on their view) is constituted by the exercise of epistemic virtues.Whether or not this is so, I will focus on two different ways in which intellectual humility makes epistemic trust knowledge-conducive: first, it equips trusters to invest trust effectively — that is, in those who are trustworthy; second, it equips trustees to be epistemically trustworthy.

I will start by sketching epistemic trust (Section 25.1) and intellectual humility (Section 25.2).Then I will show how intellectual humility promotes effective epistemic trust in oneself (Section 25.3), and how it helps relationships of epistemic trust between two parties be effective (Section 25.4). Along the way I will draw comparisons with the epistemic vices of intellectual arrogance and intellectual servility.

25.1

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

Intellectual humility has something important in common with trust: both, independently, help secure knowledge. But they also do so in tandem, and this chapter discusses how.

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