The Virtue of Epistemic Humility
Nancy Nyquist Potter
Abstract
The Virtue of Epistemic Humility Nancy Nyquist Potter, PhD* (bio) Ethics, including medical ethics, has historically paid insufficient attention to epistemic rights and wrongs. This neglect fails to recognize the ways ethics and epistemology are intertwined (Potter, forthcoming). In the past fifteen years or so, there has been an interest in epistemic issues in medical practices, relationships with patients, and what is called epistemic injustice. Miranda Fricker (2007) identifies a kind of epistemic wrong as an injustice and a harm because it diminishes the speaker's capacity of a knower and treats her as uncredible on the basis of prejudice due to their social identity as a member of a group. Scott Waterman inquires into the status of a rejection of unscientific methodologies and principles found in complementary and alternative medicine and argues that those who place their confidence in complementary and alternative medicine are not only medically but epistemically mistaken in abandoning scientific rigor (Waterman, 2022). One suggestion he makes is to cultivate epistemic humility. Epistemic Humility as a Virtue In an Aristotelian account of ethics, virtues are character traits that are necessary to living a flourishing life. Many of them are social, by which I mean they contribute to social and not just individual flourishing, such as friendship and justice. These dispositions may be expressed as an extreme. The aim for us is to find the mean, applying the heuristic of the Aristotelian Doctrine of the Mean: expressing a virtue at right time, about the right thing, toward the right people, for the right end, and in the right way (Aristotle, 1999, p. 1107a). As Jose Medina explains, epistemic attitudes and actions are a virtue as well. Expressed as a virtue, epistemic attitudes and actions contribute to the flourishing of the individual and to social life. Having this virtue involves critically reflecting on our ontological commitments, one's beliefs and belief systems, one's biases, and one's assumptions, and being willing to change or modify them. Medina calls this virtue 'epistemic humility.' When not taken to the extreme, attentiveness to one's cognitive limitations does not undermine one's confidence and erode one's character (that is, when it does not become pathological), epistemic humility can afford great benefits. Having a humble and self-questioning attitude toward one's cognitive repertoire can lead to many epistemic achievements and advantages: qualifying one's beliefs and making finer-grained discriminations; identifying one's cognitive gaps and what it would take to fill them; being able to formulate questions and doubts for oneself and others; and so on. (Medina, 2013, p. 43) This is the mean. Yet we can express a deficiency of epistemic humility: 'The absence or insensitivity [End Page 121] to epistemic resistances promotes active ignorance and the epistemic vices that support it [close-mindedness, arrogance, and epistemic laziness]' (Medina, 2013, p. 51). These vices, and the ignorance they support, can harm others, doing epistemic injustice. They also adversely affect the degree to which our bodies of knowledge can expand, become more refined, and more inclusive; a deficiency in epistemic humility closes off possibilities of approximating truths and reducing error. Resistances We are familiar with political, social, economic, and other forms of resistance, but the virtue and vices of epistemic humility focus on epistemic resistance. Resistances are the epistemic forces that keep our beliefs grounded in the face of opposition, but opposing cognitive forces also may prompt us to dig in our heels. These forces are both our subjective cognitive trajectory and external forces that shape and uphold it. In other words, 'resistance … involves the interplay of forces reacting against each other' (Medina, 2013, pp. 48–49). Medina argues that engaging with opposing epistemic forces is necessary to epistemic virtue: 'the willingness to put one's cognitive perspective in relation to that of others—calibrating the different cognitive forces, impulses, and compulsions one is exposed to—is the path to the epistemic virtues' (Medina 2013, p. 51). Medina says that to exhibit epistemic humility requires that we engage with these resistances in openness, curiosity, and humility. The Excess of Epistemic Humility The question arises as to whether there are...