Steven Bland

While there are many competing accounts and scales of intellectual humility, philosophers and psychologists are generally united in treating it as an epistemically beneficial disposition of individual agents. I call the research guided by this supposition the traditional approach to studying intellectual humility. The traditional approach is entirely understandable in light of recent findings that individual differences in intellectual humility are associated with various deleterious epistemic tendencies. Nonetheless, I argue that its near monopoly has resulted in an underestimation of important limitations of human cognition. In particular, it neglects the fact that intellectual arrogance can be both deeply recalcitrant and significantly beneficial for bounded cognitive agents whose reliance on one another is profound. I propose to integrate these insights into the study of intellectual humility by treating it as a collective virtue that gets manifested in the structure of epistemic environments. More specifically, it is an interactive virtue that harnesses and constrains intellectual arrogance to yield benefits for both individuals and collectives. I claim that this can happen only within humbling environments, such as forecasting tournaments and open institutional science.

This book confronts the threats of epistemic relativism and Pyrrhonian scepticism to analytic philosophy. Epistemic relativists reject absolute notions of knowledge and justification, while sceptics claim that knowledge and justification of any kind are unattainable. If either of these views is correct, then there can be no objective basis for thinking that one set of methods does a better job of delivering accurate information than any other set of methods. Philosophers have generally sought to resist these threats by responding to the argument that seems to motivate both positions: the Agrippan trilemma. Steven Bland argues that this is a mistaken strategy. He surveys the most influential responses to the Agrippan trilemma, and shows that none of them succeeds in undermining epistemic relativism. Bland also offers a new, dialectical strategy of challenging epistemic relativism by uncovering how epistemic methods depend on one another for their applications. By means of this novel analysis, the book concludes that there are principled reasons to prefer naturalistic to non-naturalistic methods, even if these reasons do little to ease the threat of scepticism.

This chapter examines two classic responses to the epistemic regress problem: foundationalism and coherentism. Foundationalists seek to avoid the regress by invoking the non-inferential justification of basic beliefs, while coherentists do so by introducing a non-linear conception of justification. While both of these positions focus on the possibility of justifying beliefs, neither of them can establish the trustworthiness of basic epistemic methods without relying on the outcomes of those same methods. On a strictly internalist view, this means that neither of them can successfully answer the Agrippan argument that motivates Pyrrhonian scepticism and epistemic relativism. Furthermore, they both posit subjective, variable sources of justification—acquaintance and coherence—which reinforces the case for epistemic relativism.

This chapter surveys three responses the problem of the criterion: particularists claim that beliefs can be justified without our knowing that their sources are trustworthy; methodists claim that methods can be trustworthy without our knowing that they reliably yield true beliefs; and beliefs and methods can be jointly justified by showing that they can accommodate one another in a reflective equilibrium. Each of these responses amounts to begging the question in response to the Agrippan argument, but this need not disqualify them from being effective responses to scepticism. However, the fact that these strategies also involve begging the question when used to justify an epistemic system does disqualify them from being effective responses to epistemic relativism.

Because externalists deny that we need to know that a method is trustworthy before it can confer justification on our beliefs, they see nothing amiss with arguments for the trustworthiness of a method that rely on the deliverances of that same method. By denying that epistemically circular arguments are vicious, externalists reject the Agrippan challenge rather than answering it. While this may be a viable response to Pyrrhonian scepticism, it cannot suffice as a response to epistemic relativism because cases of epistemic incommensurability can be rationally resolved only by means of suasive justifications that epistemically circular arguments cannot deliver. The chapter concludes by re-formulating the argument for epistemic relativism in light of this insight.

In On Certainty, Wittgenstein uses his theory of hinge commitments to attack Cartesian scepticism and Moorean realism. This chapter shows that it can also be used to leverage an argument for epistemic relativism that makes no use of the Agrippan trilemma. In addition, it examines Michael Williams’ and Duncan Pritchard’s anti-relativist interpretations of On Certainty. Williams reads Wittgenstein as offering a contextualist response to Pyrrhonian scepticism and epistemic relativism, while Pritchard claims that Wittgenstein attacks these positions using a Davidsonian style of coherentism. The chapter concludes that these are two more unsuccessful anti-sceptical arguments against epistemic relativism.

Vice essentialism is the view that epistemic vices have robustly negative effects on our epistemic projects. Essentialists believe that the manifestation of epistemic vices can explain many of our epistemic failures, but few, if any, of our epistemic successes. The purpose of this paper is to argue that vice essentialism is false. In §1, I review the case that some epistemic vices, such as closed-mindedness and extreme epistemic deference, have considerably beneficial effects when manifested in collectivist contexts. In §2, I add that there are putative epistemic vices whose repeated manifestation leads to significant epistemic achievements over time. Epistemic recklessness is one such unstable vice. Though Sosa argues that epistemically reckless judgements cannot constitute knowing full well, the repeated manifestation of epistemic recklessness is essential to our becoming fully well knowledgeable in the long run. Without making incompetent judgements in environments that offer unambiguous, actionable feedback, we could not develop the intuitive and reflective competences and meta-competences required for knowing full well.

The threats of scepticism and epistemic relativism are uncoupled in Kant’s transcendental idealism, which embraces a radical scepticism, while seeking to provide an absolute justification for the methods of the exact sciences. After this position was definitively undermined by developments within the exact sciences, Carnap’s logical positivism and Kuhn’s pragmatism took turns replacing it as the dominant philosophies of science of the twentieth century. Interestingly, both of these positions can be understood as endorsing the principal argument for epistemic relativism. This chapter examines these relativistic readings of Carnap and Kuhn, without endorsing them, in an effort to reveal that epistemic relativism is an endogenous threat to analytic philosophy.

This paper has four aims: first, to outline the role of the sceptical problem of the criterion in the principal argument for epistemic relativism; second, to establish that methodist and particularist responses to the problem of the criterion do not, by themselves, constitute successful strategies for resisting epistemic relativism; third, to argue that a more fruitful strategy is to attempt to evaluate epistemic frameworks on the basis of the epistemic resources that they have in common; and finally, to make the case that finding this common ground will necessarily involve determining how it is that a framework’s constituent epistemic methods depend on one another for not only their warrant, but for their application.

This chapter frames Pyrrhonian scepticism and epistemic relativism as meta-philosophical threats that rely on the same argument: the Agrippan trilemma. Philosophers have traditionally attempted to neutralize both threats by means of a common response to this argument. The chapter surveys a number of such responses before outlining a more promising, dialectical argument against epistemic relativism that has no anti-sceptical ambitions. In doing so, it elucidates the book’s central claim that Pyrrhonian scepticism and epistemic relativism are distinct threats that require different responses.

Pyrrhonian scepticism and epistemic relativism have both been attacked as self-undermining positions. This charge can be spelled out by presenting sceptics and relativists with the following dilemma: if your conclusion is true, then it cannot be defended, and if it is false, then it is not worth defending. In the sceptic’s case, if it is true that we cannot possess knowledge, then we cannot know that this is the case, and if it is false, then we should reject scepticism. In the relativist’s case, if it is true that no knowledge claims admit of absolute justification, then we cannot be absolutely justified in knowing this to be so, and if it is false, then we should reject epistemic relativism. The aim of this chapter is to show that sceptics and relativists can accept the first horn of the dilemma without rendering their conclusions indefensible or their positions incoherent.

Virtue-first approaches to regulative epistemology describe an ideal that individual inquirers should attempt to approximate, and then specify some of the measures that we can take collectively to produce more virtuous inquirers. These approaches ignore the fact that we are cognitively limited in ways that prevent us from approaching the virtue-theoretic ideal, and that we can transcend our limitations only by working together. Consequently, virtue-first approaches get things backwards: we should focus first on the conditions of collective intellectual flourishing, and then suggest ways that individuals can function as virtuous team members. This is the team-first approach to regulative epistemology. Among the conditions of collective success is an efficient division of epistemic labor that harnesses a diversity of competences, traits, and beliefs. In Sects. 1 and 2, I argue that virtue-first approaches reduce these forms of diversity by having individuals attempt to approximate a common epistemic ideal. In Sect. 3, I argue that virtue-first approaches should be de-emphasized in favor of a team-first approach that targets efficient forms of coordination and cooperation through incentive structures, role assignments, feedback mechanisms, and the like. I reinforce this position throughout the paper by making the case that efforts at science reform are more likely to succeed when they take this approach, rather than a virtue-first approach. Finally, in Sect. 4, contend that epistemic virtues have a role to play in the team-first approach, but that it is a subsidiary role.

The study of intellectual humility (IH), which is gaining increasing interest among cognitive scientists, has been dominated by a focus on individuals. We propose that IH operates at the collective level as the tendency of a collective’s members to attend to each other’s intellectual limitations and the limitations of their collective cognitive efforts. Given people’s propensity to better recognize others’ limitations than their own, IH may be more readily achievable in collectives than individuals. We describe the socio-cognitive dynamics that can interfere with collective IH and offer the solution of building intellectually humbling environments that create a culture of IH that can outlast the given membership of a collective. We conclude with promising research directions.

It would seem that an epistemic framework can be justified only by means of a non-circular argument that establishes its truth-conduciveness. The problem of epistemic circularity suggests that no such argument is possible. Externalists and particularists have addressed the problem of scepticism by claiming that epistemically circular arguments can establish the truth-conduciveness of a framework’s epistemic methods. However, since these arguments are available for a good many frameworks, this response does nothing to answer the threat of epistemic relativism. The purpose of this paper is to offer a non-circular argument in favour of naturalistic epistemic frameworks, and therefore against epistemic relativism. The argument establishes that non-naturalistic frameworks depend on naturalistic methods for their application, and therefore, they cannot be more truth-conducive than naturalistic frameworks. This argument does not establish that naturalistic frameworks are truth-conducive, but it does provide a ra..

In light of the findings of earlier chapters that anti-sceptical responses to epistemic relativism are unsuccessful, this chapter outlines other strategies of addressing the threat of relativism. Following Boghossian, Seidel attacks the relativist’s doctrine of epistemic pluralism. In doing so, he engages in a foundational analysis into the relations of justificational dependence between epistemic methods. This chapter argues that this is the wrong tool for the job; instead, epistemic relativism should be addressed by analyses that uncover relations of presuppositional dependence. Using this tool, we find that non-naturalistic methods depend on basic naturalistic methods for their application, and therefore, the former can be no more truth-conducive than the latter. We also find that the basic empirical and non-empirical methods that naturalists use depend on one another for their application, such that neither can be more truth-conducive than the other. Together, these findings constitute definitive grounds in favour of the absolutist and naturalist presumptions, though they do nothing to address the threat of Pyrrhonian scepticism.

Bernard Mandeville argued that traits that have traditionally been seen as detrimental or reprehensible, such as greed, ambition, vanity, and the willingness to deceive, can produce significant social goods. He went so far as to suggest that a society composed of individuals who embody these vices would, under certain constraints, be better off than one composed only of those who embody the virtues of self-restraint. In the twentieth century, Mandeville’s insights were taken up in economics by John Maynard Keynes, among others. More recently, philosophers have drawn analogies to Mandeville’s ideas in the domains of epistemology and morality, arguing that traits that are typically understood as epistemic or moral vices (e.g. closed-mindedness, vindictiveness) can lead to beneficial outcomes for the groups in which individuals cooperate, deliberate, and decide, for instance by propitiously dividing the cognitive labor involved in critical inquiry and introducing transient diversity. We argue that mandevillian virtues have a negative counterpart, mandevillian vices, which are traits that are beneficial to or admirable in their individual possessor, but are or can be systematically detrimental to the group to which that individual belongs. Whilst virtue ethics and epistemology prescribe character traits that are good for every moral and epistemic agent, and ideally across all situations, mandevillian virtues show that group dynamics can complicate this picture. In this paper, we provide a unifying explanation of the main mechanism responsible for mandevillian traits in general and motivate the case for the opposite of mandevillian virtues, namely mandevillian vices.

This paper examines three programmatic responses to the problem of cognitive bias: virtue epistemology, epistemic paternalism, and epistemic collectivism. Each of these programmes focuses on asinglelevel of epistemic analysis: virtue theorists on individuals, paternalists on environments, and collectivists on groups. I argue that this is a mistake in light of the fact that cognitive biases arise frominteractionsbetween these three domains. Consequently, epistemologists should spend less time defending these programmes, and more timecoordinatingthem. This paper offers empirically based arguments for the interactionist approach, and contends that its adoption is an essential step for minimizing bias in empirical science.

There is an influential, ongoing debate between traditionalists and experimentalists about how to carry out conceptual analysis by means of the method of possible cases. The debate concerns whose intuitions are evidentially relevant to philosophical theories, and which methods are most appropriate for collecting such evidence. The aim of this paper is not to take sides in this debate, but to question the monopoly that the method of possible cases has in contemporary discussions of philosophical methodology. Since early analytic philosophy is replete with methods of conceptual analysis that make no essential use of intuitions, these discussions are inevitably myopic. In particular, it will be argued that Frege’s logical analysis of arithmetic, Hilbert’s axiomatic analysis of geometry, and Poincaré’s transcendental analysis of physics are non-psychologistic methods that yield profound philosophical conclusions. None of these methods are carried out from the philosopher’s armchair or the scientist’s laboratory; instead they properly belong to mathematics and physics. Thus, by ignoring these methods, both traditionalists and experimentalists have neglected the significant role that the exact sciences can play in conceptual analysis.

Mark Alfano claims that the heuristics and biases literature supports inferential cognitive situationism, i.e., the view that most of our inferential beliefs are arrived at and retained by means of unreliable heuristics rather than intellectual virtues. If true, this would present virtue reliabilists with an unpleasant choice: they can either accept inferential skepticism, or modify or abandon reliabilism. Alfano thinks that the latter course of action is most plausible, and several reliabilists seem to agree. I argue that this is not the case. If situationism is true, then inferential non-skepticism is no more plausible than reliabilism. But inferential cognitive situationism is false. The heuristic-based inferences that facilitate successful perception and communication have proven remarkably accurate, and even the psychological research on inductive reasoning does not support Alfano’s situationism. More generally, negative assessments of human reasoning tend to ignore the fact that the research on cognitive biases focuses primarily on the performance of individuals in isolation. Several studies suggest that we reason much more effectively when in critical dialogue with others, which highlights the fact that our epistemic performance depends not only on the inner workings of our cognitive processes, but on the environments in which they operate.

The division of cognitive labor leads to what Barry has recently called epistemic alienation: a problematic separation of individuals from epistemic goods. According to Barry, individuals are alienated from epistemic virtues because an efficient division of cognitive labor requires them to manifest a lack of virtues. I argue that this is a mistaken diagnosis of the source of epistemic alienation. Participating in high-functioning collectives does not prevent individuals from being robustly virtuous; rather, our cognitive limitations make it impossible for us to live up to the highest standards of epistemic conduct. Collectives transcend these cognitive limitations to achieve what individuals cannot by harnessing those same limitations in their members. Furthermore, I argue that we should distinguish the epistemic weaknesses that facilitate the division of cognitive labor from those that result from the division of labor. Only the latter are aspects of epistemic alienation. By dividing our cognitive labor over larger populations of agents and artifacts, we have massively accelerated our rate of epistemic productivity but have thereby created conditions that are variously inhospitable for the thinking of individuals by alienating them from the products, processes, and environments of inquiry. These forms of separation are problematic insofar as they amplify intellectual vices, incapacitate reason, and induce cognitive biases.