In the typical case, when a person utters or testifies that a given proposition, p, the goal is for someone else to come to believe or know (given that p is true) that p.
Of course, this testimonial exchange can go wrong in many different ways, and various intellectual vices can contribute to this—including epistemic injustice and an absence of intellectual humility (i.e.
intellectual arrogance or intellectual servility).The 21st century has seen a “social turn” within epistemology, which has led to a growing amount of exciting research on the epistemology of testimony, peer disagreement, and the general social circumstances of human knowing. Additionally, for over 35 years, virtue epistemology has played a dominant role in the epistemological literature, which has more recently lead to a flurry of interest in particular intellectual virtues like intellectual humility and vices like epistemic injustice. And, happily, more work is now being done connecting virtue-theory with this social turn in epistemology, including exciting work on group virtues (see Kallestrup, 2016).And while this has led to some fruitful dialogue about the virtues and vices at play in the epistemology of testimony—including work exploring the relationship between epistemic injustice and testimony (see Peet 2017; McKinnon 2016;Tanesini 2016)—little work has yet been done exploring how virtues like intellectual humility (or its corresponding vices, intellectual arrogance or intellectual servility) might influence when and why we believe what others tell us, or even how they could contribute to vices like epistemic injustice.To see how these issues might be connected, consider the following influential case from Miranda Frickers Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007):
It is the Fifties, and we are in Venice. Herbert Greenleaf, a rich American industrialist, is visiting, accompanied by a private detective whom he has hired to help solve the mystery of the whereabouts of his renegade son, Dickie. Dickie Greenleaf recently got engaged to his girlfriend, Marge Sherwood, but subsequently spent a great deal of time travelling with their ‘friend'Tom Ripley—until Dickie mysteriously disappeared.
Marge is increasingly distrustful of Ripley because he seems to be obsessed with Dickie and suspiciously bound up with his strange disappearance. She also knows very well that it is unlike Dickie—unreliable philanderer though he undoubtedly was—simply to do a bunk, let alone to commit suicide, which is the hypothesis that Ripley is at pains to encourage. Ripley, however, has all along done a successful job of sucking up to Greenleaf senior, so Marge is entirely alone in her suspicion—her correct suspicion—that Dickie has been murdered, and that Ripley is his killer... Greenleaf is only too aware of how little he himself knows of his son. and yet he fails to see Marge as the source of knowledge about Dickie that she manifestly is. This attitude leads Greenleaf to ignore one of Marge's key reasons for her correct hypothesis that Dickie has died at the hands of Ripley: she finds Dickie's rings at Ripley's place, one of which had been a gift from her and which he had sworn never to remove. Greenleaf ignores it, partly because he underestimates Dickie's commitment to Marge, so that in his eyes any promise to Marge on Dickie's part is virtually worthless; but mostly because Ripley successfully constructs Marge as ‘hysterical'. Indeed, not only Greenleaf but also Marge's friend, Peter Smith-Kingsley, comes to perceive her that way, so that the net result is a collusion of men against Marge's word being taken seriously.The theme of knowledge ever to the fore in the dialogue, we at one point hear her off-screen, shortly after she finds the rings, her powers of expression seemingly reduced to a selfcontradictory mantra, repeating emphatically to the incredulous Greenleaf, ‘I don't know, I don't know, I just know it'; and it is at this point that Greenleaf replies with the familiar put-down, ‘Marge, there's female intuition, and then there are facts.'1(2007, pp. 86-88)
Herbert Greenleaf wants to know what happened to his son, Dickie; after all, that's why he came to Venice and hired a private detective. Marge knows what happened to Dickie, and she is more than happy to tell Greenleaf; however, he won't listen.
Greenleaf doesn't value Marge's testimony, and subsequently fails to recognize valuable information.As Miranda Fricker unpacks this story, Greenleaf is guilty of committing epistemic injustice against Marge. According to Fricker, Greenleaf has wronged Marge “in [her] capacity as a giver of knowledge” (2007, p. 7).This seems exactly right, but we might wonder if there is another vice lurking in the conceptual neighborhood. Perhaps we could also easily think of Greenleaf as guilty of intellectual arrogance. In snubbing Marge's testimony, perhaps Greenleaf is unjustifiably assuming that his cognitive faculties are better positioned or equipped than Marge's. And he attributes far more positive epistemic status to his beliefs regarding his son than is actually merited. But, then again, maybe we could also easily think of Greenleaf as being guilty of intellectual servility. Despite Dickie's treasured rings being found at Ripley's place, Greenleaf doesn't attribute nearly as much positive epistemic status to the belief that Ripley could be the killer that he should. And, again and again, Greenleaf simply does not track the positive epistemic status of the valuable information that Marge offers him.
In this exploratory paper, I want to consider how intellectual humility and epistemic injustice might contribute to the failure of testimonial exchanges. In Section 26.1, I will briefly highlight four broad ways a testimonial exchange might fail. In Section 26.2, I will very briefly review the nature of epistemic injustice. In Section 26.3, I will explore how both epistemic injustice and intellectual humility can lead to failures in testimonial exchange, and I'll conclude by suggesting how intellectual humility and epistemic injustice might be related.
But what is intellectual humility? One account of this virtue is the doxastic account of intellectual humility, according to which intellectual humility is the virtue of accurately tracking what one could non-culpably take to be the positive epistemic status of one's own beliefs.
On this view, intellectual arrogance would be the vice of overestimating the positive epistemic status of one's beliefs, and intellectual servility would be the vice of underestimating the positive epistemic status of one's beliefs.This is a view I have defended elsewhere (see, for example Church 2016; Church and Samuelson 2017), and I won't repeat myself here. But, to be sure, there are plenty of other accounts in the literature. For example, in their seminal account, Bob Roberts and Jay Wood (2007, 2003) defined intellectual humility as having a low concern for status when pursing various intellectual goals. Dennis Whitcomb, Heather Battaly, Jason Baehr, and Daniel Howard-Snyder (2015) have argued that intellectual humility is the virtue of attending to and owning one's intellectual limitations. More recently, Alessandra Tanesini has argued that intellectual humility is “a cluster of strong attitudes (as these are understood in social psychology) directed toward one's cognitive make-up and its components, together with the cognitive and affective states that constitute their contents or bases, which serve knowledge and value-expressive functions” (2018, p. 399). All that said, however, we don't need to worry too much about the exact definition of intellectual humility here; while I will occasionally draw from or reference my favored account of intellectual humility (the doxastic account), what I say in this chapter won't hinge too much on that particular account. I'm happy to work from a general and intuitive grasp of what intellectual humility might be. I'm hoping that most of what I say in this chapter will apply regardless of how we ultimately define intellectual humility.26.1