In the preface to Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick wonders why 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 when -she's having a conversation and the other person mentions a book or author in that way that assumes she's familiar with the work.‖ Cohen elaborates:You know when you're with people you want to impress, people you find a little intimidating? Maybe you're feeling kind of dumb, like you don't really belong with them. You're worried you'll be found out.And someone mentions a writer or the title of a book in this tone like, Naahh-turally you know what I'm talking about. And even though you have no clue, you do that little thing where you narrow your eyes and purse your lips and give this thoughtful nod. 2Mary has a quite different response in such situations, says Cohen. -She says, ‗I don't know that book.' She says, ‗I've never heard of that person.'‖ We all know people like Mary in this respect, people who easily accept or expose their ignorance rather than deny or cover it up. This too looks like behavior characteristic of intellectual humility. 2 But what is intellectual humility? What is it that Nozick suggests philosophical writings tend to display a lack of? What is it that Mary seems to exhibit in her behavior? We aim to answer these questions. Toward that end, we will (i) state and assess some current views about the nature of intellectual humility (IH, for short), (ii) propose and explain an alternative, (iii) give reasons for that alternative, (iv) address two objections to our proposal and show how our view solves a well-known puzzle about humility. Before we get down to work, four preliminary remarks are in order. Preliminary remarksWe can approach our first three remarks by way of June Tangney's account of humility. She writes: the key elements of humility seem to include: an accurate assessment of one's abilities and achievements (not low self-esteem, self-deprecation), an ability to acknowledge one's mistakes, impe...

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 modelowning 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.

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Open-mindedness enjoys widespread recognition as an intellectual virtue. This is evident, among other ways, in its appearance on nearly every list of intellectual virtues in the virtue epistemology literature. Despite its popularity, however, it is far from clear what exactly openmindedness amounts to: that is, what sort of intellectual orientation or activity is essential to it. In fact, there are ways of thinking about open-mindedness that cast serious doubt on its status as an intellectual virtue.Consider the following description, from Robert Roberts and Jay Wood (2007), of a ‘bright college freshman, taking an introductory course in philosophy.’

The moral and civic dimensions of personal character have been widely recognized and explored. Recent work by philosophers, psychologists, and education theorists has drawn attention to two additional dimensions of character: intellectual character and "performance" character. This article sketches a "four-dimensional" conceptual model of personal character and some of the character strengths or "virtues" proper to each dimension. In addition to exploring how the dimensions of character are related to each other, the article also examines the implications of this account for character education undertaken in a youth or adolescent context. It is argued that "intellectual character education," which emphasizes the development of intellectual virtues like curiosity, open-mindedness, and intellectual courage, is an underexplored but especially promising approach in this context. The relationship between intellectual character education and traditional character education, which emphasizes the development of moral and civic virtues like kindness, generosity, and tolerance, is also explored.