One way to understand what it means to be a skeptic is a commitment to the cultivation of intellectual or epistemic humility. Intellectual humility is a cognitive or epistemic virtue that requires an increased awareness of one’s own fallibility and the limits of one’s capacity for knowledge. The hope is that developing intellectual humility improves our ability to understand our world while avoiding harmful false beliefs.
However, I worry that popular approaches to promoting intellectual humility focus too much on rejection of uncertainty and objectivity, resulting in an increased risk of succumbing to reactionary centrism, contrarianism, and various forms of misinformation and pseudoscience.
Attempts to explain intellectual humility often start by focusing on exemplars of intellectual hubris, such as the extremely dogmatic or the arrogantly ignorant, looking at the behaviours and mindsets that define their approaches, and then defining intellectual humility as the opposite of that. While there is value in looking at textbook cases of what not to do, if we’re not careful this approach can also lead to an overemphasis on claims of certainty and objectivity as the primary indicators of intellectual hubris.
Consider, for example, the arc of movement atheism from the early 2000’s to the present. Atheism, as a form of skepticism about religious beliefs, often draws on appeals to intellectual humility to counteract the cognitive and cultural factors that might incline us towards religion. However, associating atheism with intellectual humility is likely to provoke derisive reactions from anyone familiar with the rise of New Atheism and the subsequent schism in movement atheism on the issue of “wokeness”.
New Atheism gained prominence after September 11th, 2001, as a reaction to both the perceived threat of Islamic fundamentalism and the surge of overt Christian Nationalism that followed the attack. Popular scientists, philosophers and public intellectuals such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett mainstreamed arguments about cognitive biases and evolved predispositions to attack the certainty of religious dogma. The aggressiveness of New Atheism generated significant interest and growth in the movement, but also exacerbated the widespread negative stereotype of atheists as arrogant, to the point where many in the movement prefer terms like “secular” or “nonreligious” over hard “A” atheism. Atheism, after all, is an assertion that theism is wrong, not merely that the individual doesn’t believe in them.
In its critiques of religious beliefs, New Atheism drew support from the “heterodox” movement, particularly the intellectual pessimism of academics like Jonathan Haidt. Haidt and others argue that humans are much more prone to act on intuitions, or pre-reflective judgements, than they are on reason, and that this fact makes us far more intellectually unreliable than we like to believe. This perspective, as opposed to a more optimistic view where we recognise the role of pre-reflective judgements in human cognition but remain bullish on our ability to know and understand things, has gained significant support in atheist and skeptic spaces. The result, once again, is a kind of skepticism that emphasises distrust of certainty or anything that feels like “dead dogma”.
The rise of this sort of intellectual pessimism has resulted in significant problems within movement atheism and skepticism, as exemplified in the schism of these movements over “woke dogma”. There are a disturbing number of examples of prominent atheists and skeptics who have become convinced that critical social justice is a religion that threatens the fabric of our society, leading them to spiral into conspiracy theories, anti-trans bigotry, and White Christian Nationalism. Indeed, our community is patient zero for the terrible argument that social justice is a religion, which is why it has all the trappings of weaker atheist arguments against intellectual hubris.
The problem seems to be that attempts at intellectual humility can easily slide into either reactionary centrism, where all “extreme” views are treated as equally suspect, or a sort of contrarianism to anything perceived as the “mainstream view”. I’ve written previously about how the latter problem often arises in spaces influenced by High Weirdness, which includes both movement atheism and skepticism.
One particularly illuminating case study for this problem is Street Epistemology, a group that arose within New Atheism and has also attracted many people to the movement by providing techniques for dealing with a deeply religious world. At first glance, Street Epistemology seems to be all about intellectual humility. The approach involves using a form of Socratic dialogue to decrease people’s confidence in their beliefs, particularly beliefs that they are extremely confident about. The hope is that, by practising this approach with others, we not only help them to avoid errors, but also habituate ourselves to be similarly uncertain and open to revising our beliefs.
However, there is significant reason to question whether Street Epistemology techniques reliably produce the sort of intellectual humility we are hoping for. As with New Atheism more broadly, several of the leading figures in the founding of Street Epistemology, such as Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, had some of the worst epistemic spirals around social justice. It is hard to know if Street Epistemology methods exacerbated their spiral, but it clearly didn’t inoculate them from reactionary ideologies in the way we would hope. The persistence of and continued promotion of reactionary views in Street Epistemology spaces also suggests those prominent individuals were not outliers. Overall, Street Epistemology and movement atheism more broadly present a cautionary tale for how attempts at intellectual humility can slide into intellectual pessimism and thereby increase the risk of adopting harmful ideologies.
Similarly, on the left side of the political aisle, the push for intellectual humility has driven many to adopt a kind of reactionary skepticism about “objective” truth, meaning claims about the world that are truly independent of our beliefs or perceptions of the world. Objectivity, for many, has come to be associated with colonialism and epistemic injustice, where the understanding of marginalised communities is devalued and dismissed relative to the views of the dominant group. While there is a genuinely horrible history of epistemic injustice that has been central to colonial consolidation of information and power, it does not follow that we should abandon claims about objective truth, or that such a thing is even possible.
These rejections of objectivity are often vague or incoherent, and often involve conflating claims of objectivity with overconfidence or unwillingness to consider diverse perspectives. William Gillis does an excellent job laying out the problems with these rejections of objectivity and how they increase the risk of reactionary politics in his book Did the Science Wars Take Place?: The Political and Ethical Stakes of Radical Realism.
Rather than take these reactionary approaches to understanding intellectual humility, we should first get clear on the nature of humility as a virtue, and then see how it applies to the domain of beliefs. Humility is the sort of virtue that fits neatly into Aristotle’s classic understanding of the virtues as the golden mean between two vices, just as how courage is the mean between cowardice and foolhardiness, and temperance the mean between excessive indulgence and excessive austerity.
The psychologist Everett Worthington and his colleagues give what I consider the most robust definition of Humility as:
(a) having an accurate self-assessment that involves seeing oneself as a limited agent, (b) making a modest self-presentation to others, and (c) being other-oriented, holding an abiding attitude characterized by care and effort toward the advancement of others.
They emphasise that “accurate self-assessment” applies just as much to one’s strengths as one’s limitations, that it tends to lead to less of both “self-enhancing and self-deprecating behaviour,” and that the care towards others that humility engenders is distinct from the performative self-sacrifice associated with faux humility or radical altruism.
If we apply this understanding of humility to the realm of knowledge, we see that intellectual humility is the mean between wishy-washiness and overconfidence. One can err with regard to intellectual humility by being overly certain or overly skeptical, and we always have to be checking in to see if we’re sliding too much one way or the other in general, but importantly that doesn’t mean we should do something like adopt a 50% credence level towards all claims, or reject any claim that feels overly assertive.
When it comes to the virtues, the right mean or balance depends on many factors, and won’t be the same for everyone all the time. Pessimists might feel that they are providing a valuable corrective for our overconfident natural tendencies, and in some contexts that is likely true and valuable. In other contexts, or when taken as a blanket approach to everything, that pessimism lands us in wishy-washiness about deeply important issues where the evidence overwhelmingly favours one side of the argument. It creates an easy permission structure for pressuring people to be open to all sorts of ideas, even ones for which there is not significant evidence. It encourages the conflation of absence of evidence with evidence of an open possibility, in open defiance of Russell’s teapot.
To give some concrete examples, it is objectively true that the holocaust happened, and I’m certain of that fact, in the sense that I do not believe evidence could ever arise that would make me doubt that claim. Any such evidence would fall under the same approach that Hume takes to miracles, in that there will always be a better explanation for it than the idea that the holocaust never happened. Appeals to evil demons or all-powerful simulators deceiving me at a fundamental level feel totally irrelevant to me in this context, they do not move the needle for me one bit.
I can say the same about the theory of evolution through natural selection and the existence of man-made climate change. I can say it about the moral truth that it is wrong, all other things being equal, to cause unnecessary suffering or impede flourishing, as well as the more straightforward moral truth that Nazism is immoral and should be resisted by all means necessary. I can also say it about my disbelief in a god and the supernatural more broadly. If I was ever confronted by an entity claiming to be god, my hope is that I would have Kirk’s presence of mind to ask it what it needs with a starship.
Practically speaking, one valuable approach to cultivating intellectual humility focuses on creating space between your sense of self and your beliefs. When we hold on to beliefs that we shouldn’t, or when we resist new information, it is often because we tend to strongly attach our identity to those beliefs, such that we can’t imagine who we would be if we didn’t hold on to them. Here, Buddhist philosophers have some of the best medicine in the form of arguments and practices for recognising that you are not your beliefs. Whether or not that sounds trivially true, it is a truth people often have trouble actually embracing, which is why the arguments and practices are so valuable.
So, for two things to be identical, they have to have all the same features, including how long they exist for. Yet you as a person existed prior to the formation of any of your beliefs, and can persist beyond the “death” of any one of them. You and they have what we call different persistence conditions, and therefore you aren’t the things you believe. That might sound a bit theoretical, but one of the simplest and most effective forms of mindfulness meditation is simply observing how beliefs and other mental states come into and out of our minds constantly, while we remain. Noting how the same is true at the scale of our whole lives creates space between our sense of self and our beliefs, which can make it easier to let one of them go or replace it with a new one when the need arises.
Having the right amount of confidence about the right beliefs in the right ways and for the right reasons: that is proper intellectual humility. It is perfectly okay to say, “I don’t know enough about particle physics to have any idea if string theory is correct, but I do know enough about ethics to know it’s always wrong to be a Nazi.” Humility does not require that we remain open to being wrong about the Nazi thing.
