Levels of humility in science

We can think about epistemic humility in the sciences as fundamentally involving efforts to respond appropriately to the multiply conditioned nature of epistemic confidence—the ways that the availability of certain materials, artefacts, and technologies structures the epistemic attitudes, activities, and ambitions available to scientific enquirers, and therefore affect what can be known and understood.

This conception of epistemic humility has a pragmatist character. To be epistemically con­fident is to be free of what Charles Sanders Peirce (1992: §4) famously called the ‘irritation of doubt', which motivates enquiry: the active ‘struggle' for ‘settlement', a state marked by a felt sense of the relative stability of our commitments and the likely efficacy of our activities. Such settlement is a precondition for the styles of smooth, unanxious epistemic comportment which make for the most effective sorts of enquiry. I suggest that epistemic humility in the sciences ought to be conceived of as an active, reflective responsiveness to the contingent, conditioned character of our epistemic capacities and our wider epistemic activities, projects, and ambitions. (Note my terminological preference for conditioned over limited.) There are a variety of things that can condition the forms, scope, stability, and strength of our epistemic confidence, which can include material conditions (e.g.

An advantage of this account of humility as a reflective appreciation of the conditioned status of our individual and collective epistemic life is that exposes certain attractive features of the scientific enterprise. We can think about the sciences as systematic efforts to develop and implement receptive material, social, and intellectual conditions for increasingly complex forms of enquiry.Within the Western tradition, this conception of science goes back to Bacon, whose proposals for the methodological disciplining of science and the collective direction of enquiry was intended to provide systematic means for nullifying our individual failings and to maximise the effectiveness of our pooled epistemic capacities and resources. Of course, there are legitimate worries about the extent to which the sciences, historically and in their current forms, actually deliver on this ideal: our scientific practices, communities, and institutions are shot through with gendered biases, suspect political and ideological influences, and other deliberate and contingent suboptimalities. Crucially, then, a proper sense of humility needs active acknowledgement of existing suboptimalities and appropriate ameliorative responses.

When applying this model of humility to the sciences, focus on confidence conditions. We can think about these as operating at three main levels—the agential, collective, and deep—with the provisos that these levels are interpenetrating, such that changes at one level can effect conse­quent changes at the others. Some of these conditions can be overcome, quickly and easily—for instance, uncertainty about the chemical composition of a substance will act to condition the confidence of a chemist tasked with its identification, but that can be solved by performing a straightforward laboratory test. In other cases, the confidence conditions will be harder to fulfil, due to practical, financial, epistemic, or other reasons The absence of a certain fossil conditions an archaeologist’s confidence in a palaeontological hypothesis, which could only be fulfilled by the discovery of that fossil—something that cannot be guaranteed, given the practical expense of excavation and the enormous gaps in the fossil record.

Consider the following examples of epistemic confidence at the three levels:

A. Agential humility is that that exercised by individual scientists, as they adopt, amend, or reject certain epistemic attitudes, or perform and reject certain epistemic actions, or accept, amend, or reject certain epistemic ambitions. Such agential confidence can be conditioned by, inter alia, the subject’s cognitive, bodily, and perceptual capacities; the education and training available to them; the variety and degree of their practical skills and competences; the self-esteem and epistemic self-trust they have developed; and so on.

B. Collective humility is that exercised by scientific collectives, such as research teams or, at a larger level, the disciplinary communities characteristic of modern ‘Big Science’ (Galison and Hevly 1992). It includes confidence in shared values and norms; systems such as peer review and data-sharing; the integrity of the disciplinary community, and so on. Such col­lective condition is conditioned by the quality, stability and complexity of the structures of local and transnational scientific communities. As those conditions change, the confidence one can reasonably invest in the collective changes, too—the replication crises in psychol­ogy and biomedicine, for instance, are often described as ‘crisis of confidence' (e.g. Pashler and Wagenmakers 2012).

C. Deep humility is motivated by the recognition that individual and collective epistemic activ­ities depend for the intelligibility and salience on something beyond themselves. Objects of deep confidence could be a certain project of enquiry, an intellectual inheritance that provides shape and direction to a research agenda, or a metaphysical vision that provides what Heidegger (1977: 118f) called a ‘ground-plan' for enquiry, that stipulates in advance the sorts of entities allowable for investigation.

Proper humility about science ought to attend to all of these levels, though not necessarily at each level at all times. The dynamics of agential confidence might be highly complex, while changes in the objects of deep confidence in science change very slowly, for instance, due to the influence of radical philosophical developments. Consider the ways that deep confidence in the capacity of human beings to describe the nature of reality was profoundly challenged by Kant's ‘Copernican Revolution' (on this example, and others, see Kidd 2017a). Moreover, an estimation of the degree of confidence one can invest, at whatever level, is often subject to uncertainty and contestation. Kant's transcendental idealism, Nietzsche's genealogy, and the ‘historical' and ‘sociological' turns of the middle-third of the 20th century each challenged the prevailing forms of deep confidence in science, even if their pertinence and force was subject to vigorous counter-challenges.

Humility, then, depends on current conceptions of science, the nature and grounds of the confidence invested in science, and the types of critical challenge considered salient within a given cultural period.

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