Intellectual Humility and Humbling Environments

Abstract

While there are many competing accounts and scales of intellectual humility, philosophers and psychologists are generally united in treating it as an epistemically beneficial disposition of individual agents. I call the research guided by this supposition the traditional approach to studying intellectual humility. The traditional approach is entirely understandable in light of recent findings that individual differences in intellectual humility are associated with various deleterious epistemic tendencies. Nonetheless, I argue that its near monopoly has resulted in an underestimation of important limitations of human cognition. In particular, it neglects the fact that intellectual arrogance can be both deeply recalcitrant and significantly beneficial for bounded cognitive agents whose reliance on one another is profound. I propose to integrate these insights into the study of intellectual humility by treating it as a collective virtue that gets manifested in the structure of epistemic environments. More specifically, it is an interactive virtue that harnesses and constrains intellectual arrogance to yield benefits for both individuals and collectives. I claim that this can happen only within humbling environments, such as forecasting tournaments and open institutional science.