Some initial characterisations

The sciences have contributed many images and metaphors that help us to conceive of the nature of humility. The more popular are exploratory metaphors of ‘discovery', an ‘ongoing quest for knowledge',‘pushing the frontiers of human understanding', and so on.

Sir Isaac Newton offered a now-famous image of the humble scientist, ‘standing on the shoulders of giants', a humble builder upon the greater work of earlier generations (quoted in Turnbull 1959: 416). Although insincere in Newton's own case, the image nicely expresses an intergenerational conception of humility: a sense of one's own dependence on the efforts of earlier generations, cooperatively building on the contributions of their predecessors, in an ennobling process of progressive, cumulative achievement.This stirring image informed the sociologist of science Robert K. Merton's famous ‘norms of scientific enquiry', who devoted an entire book to tracing the history of the ‘shoulders of giants' phrase (Merton 1942, 1965).¹

Second, there is a beautiful image of epistemic humility offered by Joseph Priestley, the Victorian theologian, chemist, and natural philosopher, that of a growing circle of light which represents our ever-growing knowledge: ‘[t]he greater is the circle of light, the greater is the boundary of the darkness by which it is confined', such that ‘the more light we get, the more thankful we ought to be' (Priestley 1790, 1: xviii-xix).With this image, Priestley conveys what we might call a dynamic conception of humility, an active sense that current limitations to our knowledge and understanding arise from contingent features of our investigative systems in ways that could be overcome with sustained investment and ingenuity.

The ‘shoulders of giants' and ‘circle of light' images are powerful ways of conveying a sort of active humility, encouraging the scientific community to actively build upon achievements inherited and to gradually expand that circle of light.Within academic and popular discourses about science, this sense of active humility is perhaps most familiar from a sense of progress, of the sort built explicitly into conceptions of the natural sciences since Sir Francis Bacon and supercharged, during the 19th century, by Auguste Comte's ‘Doctrine of the Three Stages'. If the sciences are properly performed, resourced, and respected, they will reliably deliver the goods, epistemically and practically.

Within the philosophy of science, the relationship of humility to science seems to have been articulated in at least three main ways.The first is that the epistemic imperatives of the scientific enterprise are grounded in a deep sense of humility, of the current limitations of our knowledge and understanding of the origins, structure, and processes of the empirical world, at the micro and macro scales. Our everyday experience affords some degree of knowledge and understand­ing about the nature of our world, although only to a very limited degree and, in any case, every­day experience is only an imperfect guide. Quite how much knowledge and understanding we can gain about the nature of reality is a central theme of the debates about scientific realism and anti-realism, underlying much of which is a latent vocabulary of humility—of the sort seen in the names of modern positions in that debate, such as ‘modest realism' and ‘perspectival realism' (Kitcher 2001: chapters 1-5, Massimi 2012).

Second, forms of humility have been regarded as integral to the epistemic discipline of scien­tific enquiry, therefore, to the individual and collective practice of scientific enquiry.This reflects the historical influence of the Christian tradition upon the European natural sciences, which were shaped by postlapsarian anxieties about the corrupted epistemic capacities of we ‘fallen' creatures—a history well told by Peter Harrison (1990) and Sorana Corneanu (2011).

A third way of articulating the relationship of humility to science is more epistemological, since it plays on the delicate balance within scientific enquiry of concepts such as certainty, dependence, fallibility, tentativeness, and the revisability of established truths. Much of the focus of 20th-century philosophy of science plays on these epistemological concerns, as one sees, for instance, in Karl Popper's vision of science as the fallible, self-correcting process of ‘problem-solving', proceeding by ‘conjectures and refutations' aimed at the ‘falsification' of tentatively advanced hypotheses (Popper 1959, 1963),² or in Thomas Kuhn's (1962) argument that a pragmatic attitude of ‘dogmatism' about current convictions is vital to scientific enquiry, as long as the possibility of periodic ‘revolutionary' revisions is accepted, Consider, too, newer forms of the realism debate, such as the problem of unconceived alternatives, central to which is the insistence that entrenched epistemic limitations of scientific communities will forever prevent the identification of robust alternatives to existing fundamental theories (see Stanford 2006, and Bhakthavatsalam and Kidd 2019). In these and other debates, a vocabulary of humil­ity plays a central role in critical, systematic thinking about the nature and possibilities of scientific enquiry.

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