Introduction
Recent literature suggests that intellectual humility is valuable to its possessor not only morally, but also epistemically—viz., from a point of view where (put roughly) epistemic aims such as true belief, knowledge and understanding are what matters.1 Perhaps unsurprisingly, epistemologists working on intellectual humility have focused almost exclusively on its ramifications for how we go about forming, maintaining and evaluating our own beliefs and, by extension, ourselves as inquirers.
Less explored, by contrast, is how intellectual humility might have implications for how we should conduct our practice of asserting. The present entry aims to rectify this oversight by connecting these two topics in a way that sharpens how it is that intellectual humility places several distinctive kinds of demands on assertion and, more generally, on how we communicate what we believe and know.Here is the plan: Section 29.2 gives a brief overview of intellectual humility and why it’s valuable; Section 29.3 introduces some of the main views in contemporary debate about the epistemic norms governing assertion; Section 29.4 then develops the two key ramifications for how valuing humility might shape how we go about asserting.
29.2