[MUSIC] So now in part four of the lecture, I'm going to talk about intellectual humility. First, I want to ask: what is intellectual humility? What's the nature of intellectual humility? What does it consist in? Now there are competing views here, and you will hear more about those competing views in, I think, previous lectures and maybe future lectures as well. So I don't want to say anything very specific, but I think we can say some very general things about intellectual humility that hopefully nobody should disagree with. So first, one thing to note is that humility, in general, is opposed to pride and so it makes sense to say that intellectual humility is opposed to intellectual pride. Now, some salient characteristics of pride are, first, one who's prideful overestimates one's own abilities. Which is to say one underestimates one's limitations, and that often involves underestimating one's dependence on others. If I'm a prideful person, I tend to think too much about my own contributions and not enough about other people's contributions. I might be overly confident about both what I'm doing and my ability to achieve things and what I'm actually achieving, and I might miss the value of the ways other people are contributing, and maybe miss the way that I'm actually depending on other people for whatever achievements I do make. Accordingly, now if we think of pride and humility that way, then intellectual humility will involve a more accurate assessment of one's own intellectual abilities, and thus one's own intellectual limitations, and a more adequate understanding of the ways that one does and really should depend on others. In other words, depend on others intellectually. If that's the way we're thinking about intellectual humility, it seems fairly clear that we're making intellectual humility a character virtue, an excellence of character, we're putting it in that category. We can also say that intellectual humility, like other character virtues, can contribute to both the reliability and the power of our intellectual faculties. So for example, intellectual humility will plausibly raise the reliability of reasoning and our reasoning faculties much in the way that carefulness did. So insofar as intellectual humility opposes intellectual overconfidence or arrogance, then it makes sense that the humble person might be inclined to, for example, gather more evidence, or seek out counterevidence to what they presently believe, rather than just being satisfied with their own present opinion without further investigation or without proper investigation. Now perhaps less obviously, but I think you can see this once you think about it, intellectual humility can also contribute to the power of our intellectual faculties. It can help us to get more true beliefs across a greater variety of circumstances and a greater variety of domains. This will be the case insofar as an intellectually humble person is less likely to be overly self-reliant, to insist on doing everything oneself. In other words, an intellectually humble person is more likely to appropriately rely on others. There are different ways in which we do rely on others, and appropriately so, in the intellectual domain. One of the most obvious ways is the function of testimony to, in a sense, share knowledge with each other. We often appropriately rely on testimony to know things that someone else is in a better position to know than we ourselves are. Someone who understands the importance of that sort of a share and that sort of cooperation in the intellectual realm will, of course, increase the number of true beliefs and increase the amount knowledge that's available to them by, in effect, exploiting the social resources that testimony makes available. Now, a related way in which we depend on others is the use of experts. In the intellectual realm as in the practical realm, we benefit from a kind of division of labor. We benefit when some people are more expert than others in a certain domain, so long as we're willing to take advantage of that expertise and to use it when it's appropriate to do so. Again, that's another way to increase the power. Remember, power is a matter of multiplying or increasing the number and variety of true beliefs, the range of our knowledge, and experts help us to do that, so long as we're willing to depend on them. Similarly, with a deference to authority, now some people might think that it's never proper to defer to someone on an intellectual matter, but of course, that's an overvalue there on self-reliance. We defer to people in the intellectual realm all the time, and rightfully so. For example, I'm going to defer to the authority of my doctor on certain facts about medicine, I'm going to defer to the authority of my lawyer on certain legal questions. Now that doesn't mean to defer to people blindly or unreflectively. You can do it well or you can do it poorly, but that's what character virtues are about. Finally, another kind of social epistemic dependence that an appropriately humble person will be open to is a kind of intellectual cooperation in groups. We often think about individuals as trying to achieve some knowledge or get some insight into a domain all by themselves, but as we've said, human beings are social animals. It's often the case that we work together, that we cooperate in some kind of inquiry together, in some sort of team. Scientific inquiry gives us a good example of this. It's very, very rare nowadays to have a lone scientist doing her experiments by herself outside of some broader team. So, the conclusion is appropriate intellectual humility can have tremendous payoff in terms of increased power. Not only is it going to increase reliability, but it's going to increase power as well.
