Intellectual Humility: Beyond the Learner Paradigm

Many existing theories of intellectual humility primarily focus on what it is to be a good learner. But learner is not the only epistemic role. An epistemic agent can frequently perform the role of a teacher who transmits rather than receives knowledge, or the role of a collaborator who works with others collectively on an intellectual project. I argue that there are fruitful ways of understanding intellectual humility that can account for how one excels at performing these alternative epistemic roles. Specifically, I propose and defend a “selective self-decentering account” of intellectual humility: an individual is an intellectually humble person just in case that she is motivated to perform each of her epistemic roles well, is motivated to balance her epistemic roles well against each other, and has a strong disposition to decenter selective aspects of herself because of these motivations. This account allows intellectual humility to have both a basic form and various role-differentiated forms, and it is well-equipped to explain how an intellectually humble individual’s motivations and dispositions are properly sensitive to her epistemic role.