Intellectual humility and epistemic trust

Abstract

Epistemic trust helps secure knowledge, and so does intellectual humility. They do so independently; but they can also support each other, and this chapter discusses how. Epistemic trust, at least the form discussed here, is trust in oneself or another person for knowledge. It involves a norm-governed relationship with positive affective and volitional attitudes, and is effective at securing knowledge when directed toward a trustworthy person. Intellectual humility is a character virtue that involves caring about epistemic ends and promotes accurate insight into those of one's own cognitive, affective, and volitional faculties that are relevant to acquiring knowledge. Intellectual humility, I argue, promotes effective epistemic trust in oneself and in others. It promotes effective epistemic self-trust by yielding insight into one's own epistemic trustworthiness, and by ensuring that one is motivated to epistemically self-improve if necessary. It promotes effective epistemic trust in others, at least in the context of testimony, by helping a hearer assess whether he needs outside epistemic assistance, and how apt he is at selecting trustworthy testifiers; and by helping a speaker be epistemically trustworthy.

In Trust We Trust: Epistemic Vigilance and Responsibility

“…We plan on its occurring, rather than make contingency plans in case it fails. We usually rely on the reliable: I might rely on Aisha to pick me up from the airport in part because I believe she won’t fail to do so, and Aisha may rely on her car to get her there because it never lets her down, but when our options are bad we may rely on the unreliable (Dormandy 2020 ). A climber might rely on a frayed rope to bear her weight as she navigates a tricky crevasse, because her other options are worse.…”

Epistemic Self-Trust: It's Personal

“…Here, one person, whom we may call the hearer, trusts another, whom we may call the speaker, 10 for epistemic goods such as knowledge, truth, or justified belief. These belong to a class of epistemic goods I have called representational (Dormandy 2020: 247–8) on the grounds that they portray the world as being a certain way or indicate whether a state that does so is accurate. Other examples of representational epistemic goods are evidence, probability, and reliability.…”

“…In contrast to representational goods, which a hearer trusts a speaker for, there is a second type of epistemic good for which a speaker trusts a hearer . I have elsewhere called these recognitional (Dormandy 2020: 247–8). These are forms of positive epistemic recognition that a speaker deserves.…”

“… 4 Views differ over what kind of norms the norms of trust are; they might be social, moral, or sui generis (i.e. arising from the kind of thing that trust is); for discussion see Jones (2017) and Dormandy (2020). …”

Fragmentation in One Health policy and practice responses to antimicrobial resistance and the salutary value of collaborative humility

“…Humility captures the self-reflective requirement of authentic collaboration (McMillan 2023). Epistemic humility extends the ethics of self-reflection to one's scientific and professional commitments and their inherent limitations, combined with an ability to appreciate the stances of others (Dormandy 2021;McMillan 2023). Epistemic humility was important, for example, for political leaders governing their polities through the COVID-19 crisis in real time and therefore when knowledge of the virus and its effects was only emerging and being debated (Parviainen et al 2021).…”