Some broad claims
Based on these remarks, we can make some broad claims about science and humility. First of all, humility takes many forms in the sciences, although typically the focus is on epistemic humility.
Historically, however, the sciences necessarily invoked concerns about other forms of ethical, existential, and spiritual humility, which is one reason that thinking about humility and science requires careful engagement with history of science. Second, humility operates at many different levels in the sciences, from the stances of scientific practitioners right through to multigenerational collectives to the wider scientific enterprise. Individual failures of humility, for instance, can be mitigated at the group level, by artful management of the composition and organisation of the community—this being one of the ways proposed by social epistemologists to operationalise individual epistemic vices, like dogmatism, within scientific communities (see Rowbottom 2011).A third point is that humility in the sciences is typically dynamic, in a double sense. One is that the forms and means of scientific enquiry are constantly refined, for instance as new theoretical and technological developments offer new ways of extending, enhancing, or augmenting our individual and collective epistemic capacities (see Humphreys 2004). Second, the deliverances of the sciences are constantly changing as researchers offer new theories, discoveries, models, styles of reasoning, data sets, and so on. Consistent with the idea of active humility, these developments point to constant adjustments to the epistemic limits of scientific enquiry.All of these can transform estimates of the scope and stability of our current epistemic achievements and alter our sense of what count as tenable ambitions of enquiry.
A fourth point is that the relationship between science and humility is problematic and contested, as one sees very clearly in the ongoing epistemological and metaphysical debates about the sciences. Indeed, the existence of the philosophy of science is premised on the persistence and significance of those debates, most clearly when it comes to debates about scientific realism.
We can distinguish two main sorts of challenge. First, internal challenges, inspired by reflections on the history, practice, and social organisation of the sciences as they have developed, which give grounds for critically rethinking our epistemic attitudes towards scientific practice and theory. A short list of internal challenges would include the pessimistic meta-induction (Wray 2015), the problem of unobservable entities, the underdetermination of theory by data, and scepticism about inference to the best explanation (see Chakravartty 2017: §§3—4).Second, there are external challenges, from those who question the general epistemic ambition to provide what Bernard Williams called an ‘absolute conception', an account of ‘what there is anyway’ (Williams 1978: 245). External challenges are diverse—Kantian arguments about our inability to transcend the structures of sensibility and experience, arguments about the fundamentally of metaphysics relative to natural science (Lowe 2006), phenomenological arguments that see scientific accounts of the world as prescinding from a more fundamental, taken-for- granted sense of ‘being-in-the-world' that is presupposed by, and cannot be explained in terms of, scientific enquiry (Cooper 2002: chapters 8—10, Ratcliffe 2013)—to name just a few. The upshot of these challenges is genuine, substantive disagreement about the epistemic successes and ambitions of the sciences, and the range, kind, and fixity of the limitations relevant to enquiry.
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