Intellectual Humility and Social Epistemology - John Greco

Contemporary epistemology has moved away from the epistemic individualism of internalism and evidentialism, in favor of externalism, virtue epistemology, and social epistemology. This paper explores how these various movements in epistemology are related to the notion of intellectual humility. The central idea is that, whereas intellectual pride is characterized by ideals and illusions of self-sufficiency, intellectual humility is characterized by a realistic estimation of one’s own abilities and an appreciation of one’s epistemic dependence on others.

John Greco holds the Leonard and Elizabeth Eslick Chair in Philosophy at Saint Louis University, and was co-PI, with Eleonore Stump, of the Philosophy and Theology of Intellectual Humility Project.

[YuriCoutinho-fq]

Thanks for sharing. This lecture has helped me better understand why I am and will remain an individualist.

[Millie-umbi]

Interesting video, thanks for sharing.

I do think that there's a problem with this epistemological approach. I don't think that you can escape evidentialism and individualism by using this Community of Epistemic Agents (let's call it CEA for short) model. The reason being, is that every agent in your CEA was at one point outside of your CEA. You have to use the evidence given solely to you to determine whether or not this agent should be allowed into your CEA. If you encountered someone who wasn't trustworthy, you wouldn't allow them into your CEA based on the evidence you gathered personally.

The other problem is that even once someone is a part of your CEA, you don't know something just because they do. We just pretend to know it for practical purposes and to save everyone time. In the example of the hiring of a new employee, a director of a large company will trust their HR department to make sure that they hire someone who is going to be beneficial for the company. However, it's important to note that the director doesn't *know* that the new employee chosen by HR is a good employee. Humans make mistakes about things. The HR officer may have missed a red flag in the interview because he was having an off day or got distracted. For the director to really know, he must have direct experience with the employee, or see for himself the sales results and other data from that particular employee. Furthermore, if the HR department was wrong about the new employee, that would be *evidence* that the director would have to consider to reevaluate his trust in his HR department's knowledge of things.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong about sharing the epistemic load around with people we trust. It saves us time, it allows us to specialise to a greater extent. However, I don't see that it can be a replacement for an evidentialist approach to epistemology.

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