Introduction
Humility is a complex concept with many meanings.The term ‘science’ is a complex umbrella term for a deeply pluralistic array of activities, institutions, and projects. This means that any discussion of humility in relation to science must be appropriately sensitive to these respective complexities.
In this chapter, I start by sketching a general framework for thinking about the forms and roles for epistemic humility in the sciences, and then turn to two debates in the contemporary philosophy of science—contingency and pluralism—with implications for our ways of thinking about epistemic humility in relation to the sciences. If so, then humility and science can be related in a double sense. First, humility can be understood as an aspect of good scientific practice, maybe as an epistemic virtue of scientists, individually or collectively, or an epistemic norm guiding enquiry. Humility, of certain sorts, is essential to the proper conduct of scientific enquiry. Second, science can be a source of humility, in the sense that the deliverances of scientific enquiry could help to encourage a certain humility, if that’s the right term, about our origins and significance, relative to the wider natural order as disclosed by scientific enquiry. Cashing this out is a delicate task, since much turns on how we define existentially complex matters about the meaning of human life. Some see science as a challenge to the religious traditions that, for them, confirm a sense of the meaningfulness of human life—something challenged by what critics, like Heidegger, have criticised as the ‘disenchanting’ scientific picture of the world. Some take the rival view, that the sciences provide an account of our origins and status that emphasises our particularity, of the sort captured in Stephen Jay Gould’s sense that an appreciation of our evolutionary history can feed a ‘deep humility for our status as a tiny and accidental twig on [the] luxuriating branching tree of life’ (2011: 267). Others are prone to see needless excess in such existentially charged language of ‘cosmic significance’, arguing that science simply induces a sensible sense of epistemic humility, without any deep implications for the meaning and purpose of human lives.Such existential forms of humility are not my concern in this paper, which focuses on the more tractable set of issues concerning epistemic humility—broadly stated, the reflective sense of the stability, contingency, and limitations of the knowledge and understanding made available through forms of scientific enquiry. Across all of its forms, the scientific enterprises that developed during the early modern period of European history were construed as having essential epistemic aims—to acquire epistemic goods, such as knowledge, or, ideally, truth of the origins, structure, and organisation of the natural, empirical world.
Cashing out that complex set of claims has been a matter of ongoing epistemological and metaphysical debate ever since, much of which has used a vocabulary of humility and its opposing traits, such as dogmatism and hubris. Philip Kitcher warns of the tensions between the ‘epistemological modesty' of a properly fallible, reticent scientific enterprise and the scientific anti-realists' charges of ‘metaphysical hubris' (Kitcher 2001: 22). Such philosophical tensions can have repercussions at the cultural level. Within forms of life that incorporate the sciences, they can generate destructive patterns of ‘overconfidence' and ‘disappointment', which Kitcher (2012: chapter 1) includes among the main drivers of the current ‘erosion of scientific authority'.
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