Abstract
It is often suggested that responding to a disagreement with one’s epistemic peer with anything less than conciliation (i.e., a downgrading of one’s conviction in the contested proposition) is incompatible with the demands of intellectual humility. I argue that this is mistaken, and that on the most plausible conception of intellectual humility it can be entirely reasonable to stick to one’s original judgement. What is required by intellectual humility, I claim, is further reflection on one’s epistemic position with regard to the target proposition. Crucially, however, such reflection is not to be understood as being incompatible with continued conviction in the target proposition.
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Notes
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The more natural way to express the ‘opposing’ trait to intellectual humility, at least to the extent that we are talking about an intellectual vice of deficit (rather than the corresponding intellectual vice of excess), would be intellectual arrogance. Still, the intellectually arrogant are surely also inclined to be dogmatic, so the point still holds.
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Driver (1989) seems to suggest such a view, at least as regards the supposed virtue of modesty.
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See Driver (1989) for a defence of the virtue of modesty as involving inaccuracy, though note she also distinguishes between modesty and humility in this regard, and suggests that the latter might not involve inaccuracy. See also Brennan (2007) for a related proposal (though here it is not inaccuracy as such but rather holding oneself to higher standards than one would ever hold others too).
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One might plausibly argue that the awkwardness of conceiving of any virtues, intellectual or otherwise, as demanding inaccuracy is parasitic on the point that the intellectual virtues involve a love for the truth. After all, if one holds that the virtues are broadly integrated traits, to the extent that, for example, one cannot develop the intellectual virtues without thereby developing the moral or practical virtues, then it will be hard to make sense of even non- intellectual virtues in ways that demand inaccuracy.
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For two important developments of this type of account of intellectual humility in the recent literature, see the doxastic proposal offered by Church (2016) and the limitations-owning proposal offered by Whitcomb et al. (2017). Note, however, that there are important differences between these two proposals, though they are not relevant for our current purposes. For a useful discussion of these differences, see Barrett and Church (2016).
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Indeed, I have explicitly defended the view—see Kallestrup and Pritchard (2017) and Pritchard (Forthcominga, b).
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For a development of this objection to the owning one’s limitations view, see Pritchard (Forthcomingb).
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Note that alternative views of intellectual humility will naturally go hand-in-hand with corresponding accounts of humility in general. So one would expect an owning one’s intellectual limitations account of intellectual humility to go together with an owning one’s limitations account of humility. I explore the more general question of the nature of humility and how it relates to accounts of intellectual humility in Kallestrup and Pritchard (2017).
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Thanks to Ju Wang for helpful discussion of these topics. This chapter has benefitted from three grants awarded by the Templeton Foundation, all of them for projects hosted at the University of Edinburgh’s Eidyn research centre. These are: (i) the ‘Virtue Epistemology , Epistemic Dependence and Intellectual Humility’ project, which was itself part of the wider ‘Philosophy and Theology of Intellectual Humility Project’ hosted by Saint Louis University; (ii) the ‘Intellectual Humility MOOC’ project; and (iii) the ‘Philosophy, Science and Religion Online’ project.
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Pritchard, D. (2019). Disagreement, Intellectual Humility and Reflection. In: Silva-Filho, W., Tateo, L. (eds) Thinking About Oneself. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 141. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18266-3_5
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