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Why be an Intellectually Humble Philosopher?

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Abstract

In this paper, I sketch an answer to the question “Why be an intellectually humble philosopher?” I argue that, as far as philosophical argumentation is concerned, the historical record of Western Philosophy provides a straightforward answer to this question. That is, the historical record of philosophical argumentation, which is a track record that is marked by an abundance of alternative theories and serious problems for those theories, can teach us important lessons about the limits of philosophical argumentation. These lessons, in turn, show why philosophers should argue with humility.

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Notes

  1. See also Roberts and Wood (2003, 257–280) and Zagzebski (1996, 114). On virtue epistemology, see Battaly (2008). On virtue argumentation theory, see Cohen (2009), Bowell and Kingsbury (2013), and Aberdein (2014).

  2. According to Murphy (2010, 173), “The skills of intellectual carefulness become virtues only when students come to understand and to value these skills precisely because they promote genuine knowledge.”

  3. This question is a variation on a central question in ethics, namely, “Why be moral?” (see e.g., Superson 2009, 5).

  4. On pursuing virtue theory as a research program in argumentation theory, see Aberdein (2010). See also Battaly (2010).

  5. On intellectual humility in the practice of philosophical argumentation, see Kidd (2015).

  6. Cf. Roberts and Wood (2003, 257–280) on humility and epistemic goods.

  7. Cf. Kelly (2011) on “following the argument where it leads.”

  8. It is important not to confuse the colloquial sense of ‘theory’, namely, a conjecture or a supposition, with the academic sense of ‘theory’, namely, a supported or argued for explanation. For example, philosophical theories of truth are supposed to explain what makes true propositions true by giving an account of the relation that holds between propositions and their truth conditions (e.g., correspondence, coherence, etc.).

  9. I will say more about open-mindedness and intellectual humility in Sect. 4.

  10. I acknowledge the literature on peer disagreement, which may be relevant here, and to which I have made several contributions. (see Mizrahi 2012, 2013, and 2015). In this paper, however, I would like to take a different approach. The overall argument of this paper, then, is an argument from the historical record of Western Philosophy, not an argument from disagreement.

  11. See Hickey (2009, 49–51) on how Putnam earned the nickname “renegade Putnam.”

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Acknowledgments

A version of this paper was presented at the Third Annual Philosophers’ Cocoon conference, November 2015, University of Tampa. Thanks to Marcus Arvan for his commentary and the audience for the questions. I am also grateful to Andrew Aberdein and an anonymous reviewer of Axiomathes for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

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  1. School of Arts and Communication, Florida Institute of Technology, 150 W University Blvd, Melbourne, FL, 32901, USA

    Moti Mizrahi

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Mizrahi, M. Why be an Intellectually Humble Philosopher?. Axiomathes 26, 205–218 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-015-9284-9

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