An interesting essay about intellectual humility:
Suppose you want to be a better person. (Lots of us do.) How might you go about it? You might try to become more generous and commit to donating more of your income to charity. Or you might try to become more patient, and practise listening to your partner, instead of snapping at them. These commonsense prescriptions invoke an ancient ethical tradition. Generosity and patience are virtues – excellences of character, whose exercise makes us flourish. To live well, says the virtue ethicist, is to cultivate and exercise just such excellences of character.Part of living well, though, is thinking well. Our souls have an intellectual, as well as a practical, part; we cannot live fully flourishing lives unless we flourish intellectually. Are there, then, specifically intellectual virtues – excellences of intellectual character, whose exercise makes us good thinkers? Aristotle – whose works remain a touchstone for contemporary virtue theorists – certainly thought so. The intellectual part of the soul, he wrote in his Nicomachean Ethics, strives to attain truth; accordingly, he thought, the intellectual virtues are just those dispositions that qualify it to perform this function. Where the virtue ethicist bids us to be generous and patient, temperate and brave, the virtue epistemologist bids us to be thoughtful and fair, to be diligent and open-minded. At their most ambitious, the virtue epistemologist argues not just that such traits are valuable for their own sake, or that the exercise of such virtues will (tend to) yield knowledge, but, further, that our grasp of what knowledge is, in the first place, parasitic on our understanding of such virtues. ....Like everything else, virtues go in and out of style. One purported intellectual virtue in particular has recently become intensely fashionable. Philosophers, psychologists and journalists all urge us to be more intellectually humble. Different thinkers characterise intellectual humility differently, but there are some recurring themes. The intellectually humble have a keen sense of their own fallibility (‘I’ve been mistaken in the past’). They tolerate uncertainty (‘We might never know the full truth of what happened’). They recognise the partiality and ambiguity of their evidence, along with the limits of their ability to assess it (‘New information might come to light’; or ‘I might be misinterpreting this data’). ....‘When citizens are intellectually humble,’ write the philosophers Michael Hannon and Ian James Kidd, ‘they are less polarised, more tolerant and respectful of others, and display greater empathy for political opponents.’ The intellectually humble, writes the psychologist Mark Leary, ‘think more deeply about information that contradicts their views’, and ‘scrutinise the validity of the information they encounter’.But the empirical work that underwrites these glowing assessments is often questionable. Many studies assess the intellectual humility of their experiments’ participants via self-reports. Subjects are asked to rate their level of agreement with claims like ‘I am willing to admit it if I don’t know something’; those who rate high levels of agreement are classed as having a high level of intellectual humility. The worry is not just that we are often poor judges of our own strengths and weaknesses, but rather, more specifically, that it is precisely those who are lacking in humility who are likely to give themselves high scores. Humble people, after all, don’t go around talking about how humble they are. To say ‘I’m very humble’ makes for a comically self-undermining boast. ....Even so, one might think, intellectual humility surely has an important role to play. Intellectual humility can temper some of our worst instincts. People often underestimate just how hard it can be to work out the truth. Equivocal, murky evidence is blotted out in favour of the tidy, familiar narrative. Expertise in one domain is illicitly projected onto others. Past failures – fallacious inferences, or snafus of spatial reasoning – are glossed over. Those who value intellectual humility, to their credit, beseech us to be on our guard against these all-too-human tendencies. ....We have reason, then, to be sceptical of the ambitious virtue epistemologist’s claim that we understand what knowledge is via our grasp of the intellectual virtues. Still, that’s compatible with thinking that intellectual humility makes for a genuine virtue, and, as such, that we should aspire to cultivate it.But what if it turns out that our intellectual icons – our exemplars of the intellectual good life – tend not to be humble? What if it turns out that the growth of knowledge proceeds not via humility, but rather via stubborn pig-headedness? .... (more)
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