The Puzzle of Humility and Disparity

Suppose that you are engaging with someone who is your oppressor, or someone who espouses a heinous view like Nazism or a ridiculous view like flat-earthism. In contexts like these, there is a disparity between you and your interlocutor, a dramatic normative difference across which you are in the right and they are in the wrong. As theorists of humility, we find these contexts puzzling. Humility seems like the *last* thing oppressed people need and the *last* thing we need in dealing with those whose views are heinous or ridiculous. Responding to such people via humility seems uncalled for, even inappropriate. But how could this be, given that humility is a *virtue*? The purpose of the paper is to explore this puzzle. We explain what the puzzle is and then attempt to draw some lessons from it: first, the lesson that the importance of humility is limited in several ways, and second, the lesson that humility nonetheless has several important roles to play, even for people who are in the right in contexts of disparity

Intellectual Humility: Owning Our Limitations

What is intellectual humility? In this essay, we aim to answer this question by assessing several contemporary accounts of intellectual humility, developing our own account, offering two reasons for our account, and meeting two objections and solving one puzzl

Finding middle ground between intellectual arrogance and intellectual servility: Development and assessment of the limitations-owning intellectual humility scale

Recent scholarship in intellectual humility (IH) has attempted to provide deeper understanding of the virtue as personality trait and its impact on an individual's thoughts, beliefs, and actions. A limitations-owning perspective of IH focuses on a proper recognition of the impact of intellectual limitations and a motivation to overcome them, placing it as the mean between intellectual arrogance and intellectual servility. We developed the Limitations-Owning Intellectual Humility Scale to assess this conception of IH with related personality constructs. In Studies 1 (n= 386) and 2 (n = 296), principal factor and confirmatory factor analyses revealed a three-factor model – owning one's intellectual limitations, appropriate discomfort with intellectual limitations, and love of learning. Study 3 (n = 322) demonstrated strong test-retest reliability of the measure over 5 months, while Study 4 (n = 612) revealed limitations-owning IH correlated negatively with dogmatism, closed-mindedness, and hubristic pride and positively with openness, assertiveness, authentic pride. It also predicted openness and closed-mindedness over and above education, social desirability, and other measures of IH. The limitations-owning understanding of IH and scale allow for a more nuanced, spectrum interpretation and measurement of the virtue, which directs future study inside and outside of psychology

Intellectual Humility: Owning Our Limitations

philosophical writings seem so arrogant:...the usual manner of presenting philosophical work puzzles me. Works of philosophy are written as though their authors believe them to be the absolutely final word on their subject. But it’s not, surely, that each philosopher thinks that he finally, thank God, has found the truth and built an impregnable fortress around it. We are all actually much more modest than that. For good reason. Having thought long and hard about the view he proposes, a philosopher has a reasonably good idea about its weak points; the places where great intellectual weight is placed upon something perhaps too fragile to bear it, the places where the unraveling of the view might begin, the unprobed assumptions he feels uneasy about.1 Although Nozick does not use these words, we might say that, by his lights, most philosophical writings display an astounding lack of intellectual humility. In her widely-acclaimed book, I Don’t Know, Leah Hager Cohen relates a conversation with her students about a “well-read ” and “incredibly smart” colleague named “Mary”. Mary routinely exhibits an unusual response whe

Attacking Character: Ad Hominem Argument and Virtue Epistemology

The recent literature on ad hominem argument contends that the speaker’s character is sometimes relevant to evaluating what she says. This effort to redeem ad hominems requires an analysis of character that explains why and how character is relevant. I argue that virtue epistemology supplies this analysis. Three sorts of ad hominems that attack the speaker’s intellectual character are legitimate. They attack a speaker’s: (1) possession of reliabilist vices; or (2) possession of responsibilist vices; or (3) failure to perform intellectually virtuous acts. Legitimate ad hominems conclude that we should not believe what a speaker says solely on her say-so

What are the virtues of virtue epistemology?

Unlike much of contemporary analytic epistemology, virtue epistemology focuses on the intellectual virtues and vices of an agent rather than her justified beliefs or knowledge. By and large, contemporary virtue epistemologists are interested in explaining justified belief and knowledge in terms of the intellectual virtues. In contrast, justification-and knowledge based theorists will explain the intellectual virtues in terms of justification or knowledge, if they address the virtues at all. I begin my evaluation of virtue epistemology by evaluating four proposed reasons for pursuing virtue epistemology, each of which has an ethical analogue. I then examine the nature of the intellectual virtues. I contend that there is diversity amongst the virtues. Though all of the virtues are acquired, some of them are much more lie skills than others. Some require virtuous motivations while others require reliability. In conclusion, I suggest that Montmarquet\u27s analysis of epistemic justification and Zagzebski\u27s analysis of knowledge are inadequate. There will be no single simple formula. for defining justification or knowledge in terms of the virtues. Part I : Chapters 1, 2, and 3 . Virtue ethicists have long argued that their approach to ethics circumvents some of the problems plaguing act-based theories. I identify four such problems, and evaluate the ability of virtue epistemology to avoid analogous difficulties that arise for pure justification- and knowledge-based views. Though virtue epistemology is better suited to explain understanding and those aspects of our epistemic lives that are uncodifiable, it is no better at explaining the social factors in individual knowledge or at avoiding the internalist-externalist debate. Part II : Chapters 4, 5 and 6 . I argue that though all of the intellectual virtues are acquired, some, like the disposition to recognize salient facts are much more like skills than others. They are like skills because they do not require virtuous motivations. Other virtues, like open-mindedness, require a motivation for truth, but do not require reliability. Accordingly, there will be no single simple formula that defines knowledge or justification in terms of the intellectual virtues

Vectors of epistemic insecurity

This chapter highlights the ways in which epistemic virtue and vice depend on the larger structure of one’s epistemic community. It addresses the way that modal epistemic standings and the virtues and vices that accompany these standings are networked. The chapter argues that safety in a social network context is best understood as vector-relativized. Given this framework, authors discuss the virtues and vices that are operative within the social epistemic context and how these dispositions related to attention, motivation and cognition, navigate the trade-offs between security and safety narrowly construed. They argue that understanding safety as vector-relativized brings modal epistemic standings in line with a truly social epistemology. Virtue epistemologists have largely neglected the ways in which epistemic virtue functions in social epistemic environments of inter-connected information sharers