Heather Battaly

Some of the students in our classrooms doubt their intellectual strengths—their knowledge, abilities, and skills. They may be unaware of the intellectual strengths they have, or may ignore, lack confidence in, or under-estimate them. They may even incorrectly judge themselves to be intellectually inferior to their peers. Students who do such things consistently are deficient in the virtue of intellectual pride—in appropriately ‘owning’ their intellectual strengths—and are on their way to developing a form of intellectual servility. Can the ‘standard approach’ to intellectual character education help these students make progress toward intellectual pride? This article argues that there are two limitations in its ability to help. First, the standard approach isn’t likely to help unless it is combined with classroom strategies for ameliorating servility. Second, even when it is combined with ameliorative strategies, any progress it might make in the classroom is likely to be fleeting when a student’s servility is caused by systemic epistemic injustice. This article suggests that rather than prioritize the standard approach, we prioritize strategies that aim at systemic change and amelioration.

This article argues that an interlocutor’s deference and open-mindedness can indicate servility rather than virtuous humility. Section 1 evaluates an influential philosophical analysis of the virtue of humility and two psychological measures, all of which emphasize the contrast between humility and arrogance. Section 2 develops a philosophical analysis of servility, building on the limitations-owning view. It argues that servility is an unwillingness or inability to be attentive to and own one’s strengths, and a disposition to be overly attentive to and over-own one’s limitations. Section 3 sketches a picture of servility in political discourse, suggesting that we can expect servility to be positively correlated with deferring to others, open-mindedness, and belief-revision, and negatively correlated with anger. Section 4 sketches a picture of countering servility in political discourse through the virtues of pride and humility. By comparison with servility, we can expect virtuously proud and virtuously humble people to exhibit higher correlations with refusals to defer, to be open, to engage, and to revise beliefs. It points us toward psychological measures that aim to distinguish the virtue of humility from the vice of servility.

This article evaluates Alessandra Tanesini’s analyses of the intellectual virtues and vices of self-assessment, as characterized in her book The Mismeasure of the Self (2021 Tanesini, A. 2021. The Mismeasure of the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]). Section 1 explains Tanesini’s rich accounts of the virtues of intellectual humility and pride. Contra Tanesini, section 2 suggests an alternative account according to which the intellectual virtues of humility and pride require reliability about one’s limitations and strengths. This is an externalist version of the limitations-owning analysis, which takes the virtues of intellectual humility and pride to consist in (roughly): dispositions to appropriately attend to and own one’s limitations and strengths (Whitcomb et al. 2017 Whitcomb, D., H. Battaly, J. Baehr, and D. Howard-Snyder. 2017. “Intellectual Humility: Owning Our Limitations.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (3): 509–539. doi:10.1111/phpr.12228.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]). I also explore whether the intellectual vices of self-assessment require unreliability about one’s limitations and strengths. In so doing, I raise a question about Tanesini’s analysis of self-abasement.

This article argues that the Seven Solutions in the US, and the Research Excellence Framework in the UK, manifest the vice of epistemic insensibility. Section I provides an overview of Aristotle's analysis of moral vice in people. Section II applies Aristotle's analysis to epistemic vice, developing an account of epistemic insensibility. In so doing, it contributes a new epistemic vice to the field of virtue epistemology. Section III argues that the (US) Seven Breakthrough Solutions and, to a lesser extent, the (UK) Research Excellence Framework manifest two key features of the vice of epistemic insensibility. First, they promote a failure to desire, consume, and enjoy some knowledge that it is appropriate to desire, consume, and enjoy. Second, they do so because they wrongly assume that such knowledge is not epistemically good. The Solutions wrongly assume that any research that lacks ‘impact’, in the form of funding, thereby lacks epistemic value. The REF wrongly assumes of otherwise comparable bodies of research, that the research that lacks ‘impact’ has less epistemic value.

Unlike much of contemporary analytic epistemology, virtue epistemology focuses on the intellectual virtues and vices of an agent rather than her justified beliefs or knowledge. By and large, contemporary virtue epistemologists are interested in explaining justified belief and knowledge in terms of the intellectual virtues. In contrast, justification-and knowledge based theorists will explain the intellectual virtues in terms of justification or knowledge, if they address the virtues at all. ;I begin my evaluation of virtue epistemology by evaluating four proposed reasons for pursuing virtue epistemology, each of which has an ethical analogue. I then examine the nature of the intellectual virtues. I contend that there is diversity amongst the virtues. Though all of the virtues are acquired, some of them are much more lie skills than others. Some require virtuous motivations while others require reliability. In conclusion, I suggest that Montmarquet's analysis of epistemic justification and Zagzebski's analysis of knowledge are inadequate. There will be no single simple formula. for defining justification or knowledge in terms of the virtues. ;Part I: Chapters 1, 2, and 3. Virtue ethicists have long argued that their approach to ethics circumvents some of the problems plaguing act-based theories. I identify four such problems, and evaluate the ability of virtue epistemology to avoid analogous difficulties that arise for pure justification- and knowledge-based views. Though virtue epistemology is better suited to explain understanding and those aspects of our epistemic lives that are uncodifiable, it is no better at explaining the social factors in individual knowledge or at avoiding the internalist-externalist debate. ;Part II: Chapters 4, 5 and 6. I argue that though all of the intellectual virtues are acquired, some, like the disposition to recognize salient facts are much more like skills than others. They are like skills because they do not require virtuous motivations. Other virtues, like open-mindedness, require a motivation for truth, but do not require reliability. Accordingly, there will be no single simple formula that defines knowledge or justification in terms of the intellectual virtues