Higher Education, Academic Communities, and Intellectual Virtues

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WARD E. JONES is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rhodes University, P.O. Box 94,

Grahamstown 6140, South Africa; e-mail <[email protected]>. His primary areas of

scholarship are epistemology, ethics, and metaphilosophy.

Higher Education, Academic Communities, and the Intellectual Virtues

Ward E. Jones

Department of Philosophy

Rhodes University, South Africa

ABSTRACT. Because higher education brings members of academic communities in direct contact

with students, the reflective higher education student is in an excellent position for developing

two important intellectual virtues: confidence and humility. However, academic communities

differ as to whether their members reach consensus, and their teaching practices reflect this

difference. In this essay, Ward Jones argues that both consensus-reaching and non-consensus-

reaching communities can encourage the development of intellectual confidence and humility

in their students, although each will do so in very different ways.

Introduction

One difference between higher education and the levels that precede it is that higher

education students tend to be in direct contact with working members of academic

communities. University teachers belong to, and to their students they represent, groups of

individuals engaged in inquiry about significant features of our world. We might say that it is at

the level of an undergraduate education — the level at which the claims in this essay are most

relevant — that academic communities first have their own students.

This has significant implications for the achievement of one aim of education, the

generation of intellectual virtues. Because of its proximity to academic communities, higher

education teaching provides an excellent situation for students’ sophisticated development of

two central intellectual virtues: confidence and humility. I will argue that higher education

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teachers can encourage the development of these two virtues by being reflective in their teaching

— by encouraging their students to become aware of the nature of the epistemic situations into

which they are entering.

However, I will argue that there is a stark difference between, on the one hand, the way

in which students in consensus-reaching academic disciplines — such as those in the natural

sciences — are epistemically related to their lecturers’ communities and, on the other hand, the

way in which students in academic communities that do not aim at consensus — such as those in

the humanities — are related to theirs. The nature of consensus-reaching communities entails

that a scientific lecturer presents material to students that, in general, has the backing of his or

her entire community. This is not true of the material presented by a lecturer in non-consensus-

reaching communities. Lecturers, in short, bring their students into differing epistemic

positions, depending upon whether they are members of a consensus-reaching community or

not. As a consequence, while lecturers from both consensus-reaching and non-consensus-

reaching academic communities can encourage the development of both of these virtues in their

students, they will do so in very different ways.

Intellectual Confidence and Intellectual Humility

The argument I develop in this essay rests upon the assumption that it is a desirable aim

of education that students develop intellectual virtues. I do not assume that the development of

any intellectual virtues is the only, or even the highest, aim of education. Nor do I assume that

there cannot be objections to educators aiming for intellectual virtues in certain contexts,

because, say, doing so is deemed too expensive in terms of the resources it requires.

Nevertheless, if educators can readily, inexpensively, and with reasonable hope of success take

steps to lead their students to develop some of the intellectual virtues, there can be no objection

to their doing so, and there is every reason to praise them if they are successful. After all, to

possess the intellectual virtues is to be characterized by intellectual excellence and that is

certainly a desirable thing for our students to achieve under our tutelage.

The two virtues that concern me here characterize agents in the light of their tendencies

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to believe what they do. Intellectual confidence and humility, as I conceive of them, are

dispositions of persons to form beliefs of strengths that are appropriate to their epistemic position.

A person’s epistemic position with respect to a domain is his or her capability, by proceeding

with care, to achieve some epistemic good, that is, to form a belief about the world that is either

warranted (justified, rational, and the like), that is correct, or that will count as knowledge.

Epistemic positions vary a great deal from person to person, time to time, and domain to

domain. My epistemic position with respect to the weather in my town right now, for example,

is good, given that my window is open and my perceptual systems are in good working order; I

am readily able, in other words, to gain knowledge about the weather in my town at the

moment. My epistemic position with respect to what the weather in my town will be like next

week is less strong, because I am dependent upon someone else’s — for example, a

meteorologist’s — ability to make a complex inductive inference. Given that I own a television

and can check the Internet, however, my epistemic position with respect to next week’s weather

is better than that of someone in my town who does not have access to a television or the

Internet. This is because I have ready access to what meteorologists have concluded about the

weather in my town next week, while someone without a television or the Internet does not. We

will not always be able to compare a range of epistemic positions so readily, but our ability to

do so in certain cases suffices for my purposes in this essay.

With the notion of an epistemic position in hand, I can now characterize the two virtues

that interest me here. The virtue of intellectual humility flows out of a proper grasp of the limit,

boundary, or weakness of one’s epistemic position. The humble believer does not believe when

his or her epistemic situation does not call for it, and does not believe with more strength or

intensity than his or her epistemic position calls for. The virtue of intellectual confidence, on the

other hand, emerges from a grasp of the strength or scope of one’s epistemic position; the

virtuously confident believer forms a belief when his or her epistemic situation calls for it, and

does not believe it with less strength or intensity than his or her epistemic position calls for.1

The virtue of intellectual humility covers a surprisingly broad range of closely related

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intellectual dispositions. In their thorough discussion of intellectual humility, Robert C. Roberts

and W. Jay Wood vividly illustrate this diversity by listing some of the many “vice-

counterparts” to humility: “Humility is opposite a number of vices, including arrogance, vanity,

conceit, egotism, grandiosity, pretentiousness, snobbishness, impertinence (presumption),

haughtiness, self-righteousness, domination, selfish ambition, and self-complacency.”2 While

Roberts and Wood discuss humility as it is opposed to arrogance and vanity, the particular kind

of humility that I discuss here is opposed to intellectual complacency, pride, or smugness. The

complacent, prideful, or smug believer is not as vicious as the arrogant believer —such a

believer does not have an unwarranted conception of him- or herself as excellent or superior3 —

but is nonetheless lacking an appropriate grasp of his or her epistemic limitations. The

complacent, prideful, and smug believer is missing a sense of his or her limitations as a believer;

in other words, such believers lack a critical view of their epistemic abilities. The intellectually

humble believer, in contrast, grasps the boundaries, weaknesses, and limitations that he or she

has, and this person’s beliefs appropriately reflect this grasp.

Some readers will find it surprising that I conceive of confidence as an intellectual

virtue. Not all instances of a confident disposition are virtuous; simply being confident is not

virtuous. Nevertheless, certain instances of a confident disposition are virtuous. A person who

is virtuously confident has the praiseworthy disposition, given the epistemic position he or she

occupies, to avoid unwarranted indecision or hesitation in believing. In this regard, we could

compare the disposition to be silent, which, like confidence, is not always a virtue (simply being

silent is not virtuous), but which can be virtuous. A person who is virtuously silent has the

praiseworthy disposition to withhold his or her voice when and because it is appropriate to do so

— as, for example, when this person’s voice has had too much of an effect, or a negative effect,

in his or her context, or when the person knows that his or her input will have an unduly large

effect in the context.4 Similarly, intellectually confident believers are disposed to believe when

and because it is appropriate, and in a manner that is appropriate, given the strength and scope

of their epistemic position.

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There is an intimate relation between intellectual humility and intellectual confidence. In

particular, it looks as if intellectual confidence and humility are what Roberts and Wood call

“complementary virtues.”5 They argue that courage and caution are complementary virtues,

since both are related to our cognitive fears; the intellectually cautious person is “properly

attuned” to epistemic dangers, and the intellectually courageous person has the “power to resist

or overcome” those fears. In a similar manner, we can see both intellectual confidence and

humility as related to epistemic poise or balance: the intellectually confident and humble person

believes in a manner that is appropriate given his or her epistemic position. If humility is not

gained, there is a danger of the virtue of intellectual confidence becoming the vice of arrogance;

and if confidence is not gained, there is a corresponding danger of the virtue of intellectual

humility becoming the vice of intellectual cowardice. The intellectually confident and humble

person is thus cognitively balanced, believing as and when he or she should. Because such

people are confident, they believe when and because their epistemic position calls for it, and

they believe what they do to an appropriate strength; because they are humble, they do not

believe when their epistemic position does not call for it, or they believe weakly if their position

calls for that.

It follows from the definitions of intellectual confidence and humility — as appropriate

responses to one’s epistemic position — that virtuously confident and humble persons must

have some grasp of their epistemic position. In order to respond to my epistemic position with

appropriately poised believing, I must know what that epistemic position is. Accordingly, an

educator who seeks to instill in his or her students the intellectual virtues in general, or

intellectual confidence and humility in particular, should aim to give those students a reflective

awareness of the epistemic positions that they are coming to occupy in his or her classroom. This

educator’s students must know what their epistemic positions are, so that they can respond

with appropriate (strengths of) beliefs. Higher education, as we will see, is especially well

positioned to achieve the reflective element in students’ education that will lead students to

attain this complex balance.

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Academic Communities and Their Products

Those who identify themselves with academic disciplines belong to communities of

individuals who also identify themselves this way. The boundaries of these communities are

both fluid and vague. An academic biologist, for example, belongs to a number of communities,

all of which are embedded in the larger community of biologists. This scholar may belong to the

community of theoretical biologists, of evolutionary biologists, of biochemists, of cellular

biologists, of molecular biologists, of biotechnologists, as well as to subcommunities within each

of these communities. Other members of some of this biologist’s communities may include

scientists who do not consider themselves biologists at all; certain communities of biochemists,

for example, may think of themselves as belonging to the broader community of chemists and

as not belonging to the broader community of biologists.

A distinguishing feature of one prominent form of higher education is that its students

are taught by working members of academic communities. Of course, this is not true of all

higher education; there is a great deal of professional, vocational, artistic, linguistic, and

technical teaching in the higher education sector in which students are not taught by members

of academic communities. Nevertheless, this model of higher education teaching prevails in the

humanities, mathematics, and the natural and social sciences. While there are individual

exceptions even in these fields — some teachers at this level do not attend conferences, give

talks, or write for publication — I take it that active involvement with an academic community

is at least an ideal of higher education teaching in the humanities, mathematics, and the sciences.

Whether they are active scholars or not, higher education teachers are expected to be familiar

with work that has been and is being done in their academic community, and it is expected that

their students will be taught material that comes directly from the work done within that

community. This is perhaps the central norm governing higher education teaching in the

humanities, mathematics, and sciences: students at this level should be taught material

generated within an academic community; that is, they should be taught what we might call the

products of academic communities.

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As I want to show, higher education students taught in this way come to occupy an

epistemic position that is dependent upon both the kind of academic community to which their

teacher belongs and what it means to be a member of that community. That is, the kind of

epistemic position that an undergraduate student occupies in higher education learning is

dependent upon the kind of epistemic position that people outside an academic community —

as are undergraduate students — can be in with respect to the claims being made within the

community. In the remainder of this section, I will discuss a feature that all academic

communities share, namely their inward-looking nature. In the next section, I will look at how

science and humanities academic communities differ and the importance of this difference to

the epistemic position that higher education students come to occupy.

One of the defining features of academic communities is that they carry out controlled

internal dialogues; an academic community is a group of professionals talking to each other.

Academic work is, by and large, inward-looking; the academic publishes — one of his or her

primary aims as an academic — to be read by academic peers, and his or her work is

constructed to make a contribution to the conversation that those peers are having.

Accordingly, academics initially share their research with those in their community. In this

respect, the academic community differs fundamentally from, say, literary and artistic

communities, the members of which create work primarily for an audience wider than that of

their peers. While painters or composers may care a great deal what their peers think of their

work, they are not creating fundamentally for their peers. The opposite is true of the greater

part of academic creativity.

It is this inward-looking nature of academic work that provides the basis for the

derogatory “ivory tower” caricature of the academic — the academic as overspecializing, as

using too much technical jargon, as making no effort to share his or her work with anyone other

than a narrow circle of peers. While this image may hold a critical truth, there are very good

reasons for the inward-looking nature of academic discourse. In the first instance, the fact that

academics initially share their work with their peers means that any individual’s academic

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work will be initially vetted by those who are well suited to do so. Before a scholar’s work is

shared with the public or utilized in decision-making processes or technology, it is subjected to

the scrutiny of other members of the particular academic community, individuals who are

familiar with the discussion that led to the work at issue and who, consequently, understand

the presuppositions and assessment criteria upon which the claims being made are based. The

fact that academic work is in the first instance presented to an academic community also means

that such work is contextualized within a larger discussion. This means that when someone

from outside the immediate community (or, perhaps, from the community at a later time)

wishes to engage with a piece of academic work, this person has the option of readily

discovering the discussion within which the work first appeared. If nothing else, this may allow

the person to find alternatives to the claim at issue. At least in the initial stages of debate, claims

are surrounded by the differing approaches and contradictory claims of other members of the

scholar’s community.6

Most importantly for my purposes here, the inward-looking nature of academic

discourse is vital to the productivity of academic discourse, for the fact that academics have

narrowed their audience allows — indeed forces — the dialogue within the community to press

on. An intra-focused, specialist community can make theoretical, conceptual, and imaginative

progress in a way that a more open, inclusive community could not. In scientific communities

this progress has tangible, often technological results, as scientists correct and build upon each

others’ findings; in humanities communities, this progress will be conceptual or imaginative, as

the members push each other to explore new conceptual connections, reasons, and ways of

expression. In both cases, such progress would be seriously hindered if academics had to spend

a significant amount of their time sharing results with a wider audience.

While there may be truth to the “ivory tower” image of the vernacular-speaking,

inward-looking academic community, these much-maligned features have a point, one that is

crucial not only to the productivity of academic communities, but to that which can be shared

with their students. Academic communities carry out exclusive discussions, discussions that —

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ideally, at least — generate new claims, insights, questions, approaches, arguments, and

technologies. These are the products of academic discussion: the various results that inevitably

emerge from the sort of local, controlled, and motivated discussions that academics have with

each other. It is these products that higher education lecturers share with their students. These

students, then, learn, by and large, the products that result from academic communities

pressing on. Exposure to these products is what higher education students get from their close

proximity to academic communities.

Academic Communities, Consensus, and Higher Education Teaching

Once we look beyond the inward-looking nature of all academic communities, however,

significant differences between different kinds of communities start to emerge. One striking

difference is that between communities that aim to achieve consensus on matters of research and

those communities that do not aim at consensus. This difference is the topic of this section, and

the implications of this difference for the cultivation of intellectual confidence and humility is

the topic of the next section. As we will see, the presence or absence of consensus means that the

“products” of these academic communities are generated in very different ways; this has

important consequences in terms of the “exportability” of these products to students.

As we will see, the natural sciences fall firmly within the first category, and most

humanities communities fall into the second category. This does not, of course, exhaust the

academic communities discussed in the previous section; it omits the social sciences and

mathematics. However, the presence and importance of consensus in the social sciences and

mathematics is a complex affair. Accordingly, while I suspect that much of what I say in the

remainder of my discussion is relevant to higher education students in mathematics and the

social sciences, I focus upon the natural sciences and humanities, as they most clearly aim at, or

— in the case of the humanities — avoid aiming at, consensus.7

Scientific Communities and Higher Education Teaching

One of the most important lessons about scientific practice to be learned from the work

of Thomas Kuhn is that the final stage of theory acceptance is communal.8 The end of the

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process of investigation and debate is characterized by a remarkable unity in the scientific

community in its acceptance of theories. Kuhn claimed that this feature is a defining

characteristic of scientific communities: a community is not a scientific community until it

accepts theories with unity. Indeed, Kuhn also suggested that it is this characteristic that

constitutes scientific progress: since the whole community achieves consensus in accepting a

claim or theory, the community as a whole can move on to a new area of study.9 A practice of

unanimous commitment will inevitably lead to clear and community-wide patterns of theory

change, patterns that can readily be interpreted as progress. By contrast, in a field like

philosophy, Kuhn suggested, the lack of communal agreement means that it is harder to come

by any community-wide long-term change that can be construed as progress.

Whether or not Kuhn was right to define either scientific communities or scientific

progress in terms of unity in acceptance, he was clearly right that such unity is a striking

characteristic of scientific communities. Although there can be enormous and heated conflict

between individual scientists on current areas of study, there is notable consensus on

previously debated claims. Conflict over theory acceptance inevitably ends in (at least

temporary) community-wide consensus.

One vivid manifestation of the community-wide agreement that characterizes scientific

communities is the possible emergence of a scientific “dissident,” a working scientist who

disagrees with the consensus of his or her community. Scientific dissidents are rare and their

voices are muted, but they do on occasion generate public attention. One of the more notable

such occasions occurred in 2000, when the president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, sought

counsel with a handful of dissident scientists in the area of HIV/AIDS research. His doing so

generated a vehement response from the HIV/AIDS research community, culminating in the

so-called Durban Declaration, an open statement, signed by over 5,000 scientists, stating that the

evidence supporting the link between HIV and AIDS is “clear-cut, exhaustive, and

unambiguous.”10

If there were not considerable unity in scientific theory acceptance, then the notion of a

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scientific “dissident” would have no purchase. The very possibility of an intellectual dissident

arises from an individual being set in opposition to a powerful and disagreeing opponent.

While a political dissident is up against individuals who hold positions of power, such a

hierarchy of power does not characterize science. Rather, scientific dissidents are dissidents

from within the scientific community (or the vast majority of the community). Again, we can

contrast science with a field such as philosophy, in which the kind of unified response to Mbeki,

manifested in the Durban Declaration, is unthinkable. While there are dominant and prevailing

views in philosophy, the philosophical community is not characterized by the unity that allows

for a meaningful notion of a philosophical dissident.

Essential to the community-wide nature of scientific theory acceptance is the public

nature of scientific discourse. It is essential to the community’s unity in acceptance that all

members of the community have ready access to claims and their defenses. In this regard, we

can see scientific publishing, and scientific theory acceptance, as a two-stage public peer-

reviewing process. In the first stage, an article (with claims based on a set of observations or

experiments) is evaluated by a given journal’s editors and reviewers and is published. It is

made public and presented to the community at large. The entire community acts as the second

stage of peer review for an article. If published claims are not challenged, then they are

available for incorporation by the community in some form; they can be said, in other words, to

be accepted into the community’s theoretical edifice. If the claims made in a published article

are not challenged by members of the community, and do not disappear into obscurity, then

they become part of the community’s commitments. Once this unity is achieved, scientific

communities have strict mechanisms for marginalizing proponents of dissident positions. The

“creationist biologist” and the HIV-denier do not have access to the same kind of jobs or places

for publication as those members of the biological or biochemical communities that toe the

party line.11

The opposition that scientists have to dissidents in their community derives from the

fact that dissidents ask the community to revisit the evidence for claims that the rest of the

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community treats — and wants to continue to treat — as having been settled. That is, one feature

of the phenomenon of consensus in science is that once agreement is reached, the original

justification for a claim can (over time) be forgotten, and it need not be revisited.

Unsurprisingly, this manifests itself in scientific teaching. Science lecturers ask their students to

simply accept claims that their community has agreed upon: the epistemic position of the science

student is that of a hearer who receives testimony from an informant; in everyday testimony, a

hearer inherits his or her epistemic position from the speaker, even though the hearer does not

know the details of how the speaker came to have the knowledge that he or she has imparted.

In the same way, science students inherit their epistemic position from their lecturer, even if

neither the students nor their lecturer know the details of how the community came to occupy

its particular epistemic position with respect to the claims the students are learning.12 The

science lecturer does not, in most cases, revisit the justification for those claims. The majority of

undergraduate scientific education involves learning claims that the community no longer

questions, without learning precisely why the community accepted them in the first place.

This must not be exaggerated. I do not deny that science higher education teachers often

address the evidence for particular claims being taught. More importantly, I do not deny that a

science education involves giving students a sense of the justificatory procedures endorsed by a

scientific community. Through research projects and laboratory exercises, science students

learn, and learn how to carry out, the methodologies by which the claims they are being taught

were justified. However, science students do not have a grasp of the justification for much of

what they learn; these students would, in many cases, be surprised to find out how many of the

claims that they have accepted were first established, and, in many cases, they may have no

idea how they were established. I studied biology as an undergraduate student, and while my

education gave me a good grasp both of the general principles and particular details in many

biological fields, I could not have told you why most of what I learned was accepted by the

salient community — much less why it was accepted over now-forgotten competing principles

and ideas. While I had a decent grasp on the theory of evolution by natural selection, I was very

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surprised at both the nature and enormous range of evidence that Charles Darwin rallied in his

pathbreaking 1859 work The Origin of Species when I read it after graduation. The same is true of

many of the details I was asked to learn; while I recall being fascinated by a lecture on the then-

unsettled debate over undifferentiated animal-cell migration, my lecturer did not deem it

important to tell us how the scientists involved in the debate were defending their respective

positions.

This is not a criticism of the science education that I had, nor of science education in

general. The bulk of an undergraduate science education involves being asked to grasp a certain

picture of the world and to accept it because it has been established and agreed upon by an

academic community.13 This is because the products of scientific communities, the results of the

working interactions of their members, are agreed-upon claims. Reflective science students will

understand this; they will grasp the fact that the products of scientific communities are the

result of a consensus reached on both particular and more general claims, and they will

understand that this is why they are invited to more or less simply accept what their lecturers

tell them.

Humanities Communities and Higher Education Teaching

Humanities academic communities are involved in projects that can be divided into two

camps. Some communities strive to find new ways of conceiving human life and the world we

live in and of defending those conceptions; these communities prominently include philosophy,

cultural studies, critical theory, history, religious studies, and certain subcommunities in the

social sciences. Other humanities communities seek to find new ways of approaching and

interpreting literature, film, music, and art, as well as our spectatorship of all of these. These

two categories are not exhaustive of humanities academics — they omit the creative writing and

visual arts academic, for example — but they include the kinds of academic humanities

communities with which I am interested here: the discursive, inward-looking communities

whose members engage in nonfictional writing.

The members of humanities communities, in stark contrast to the science communities

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discussed earlier, harbor no expectations of converting all or most of their peers. While

mechanisms for “banishing” humanities academics who do certain kinds of work may exist at

the subcommunity level — in, say, individual departments and journal editorial boards — they

are not used by the humanities community as a whole. Of course, humanities academics would

like to have some of their colleagues agree with them, but they do not expect community-wide

agreement with their claims. To academics in the humanities, attention is more important than

agreement; they wish to be read and discussed by their colleagues, to have their claims found

interesting.

This is not to say that members of humanities communities do not agree about anything.

All disagreement takes place against a background of agreement; there must be a great deal of

agreement before a group of persons can engage in any kind of discussion at all. What the

members of humanities communities do not expect agreement upon are claims made by them to

other members of the community in their professional roles as academics. Even if there happens to

be a good deal of agreement on some issue of salience in a community, this will be less a

consciously forged agreement than a de facto circumstantial convergence of the community

members’ attitudes. Such convergence would not be something that the community will have

sought. Indeed, I suspect that the members of many humanities fields would see community-

wide consensus as undesirable and something to be treated with suspicion; a subject area that

commands full agreement is a subject area that needs more work.

One consequence of this feature of humanities communities is that competing theories

or competing (modes of) interpretation always coexist within a community as potential

candidates for discussion and interrogation. Positions perennially exist alongside — and in

many cases gain their identity from — other, competing positions. A new and groundbreaking

claim in the humanities does not supersede a currently available position in the sense of

replacing it; the former more or less takes a place next to the latter. Certain members of the

community may see a groundbreaking work as superseding previous positions, and the new

position may garner attention that previously belonged to other positions. However, such

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attention will be both positive and negative. In contrast to the scientist, the humanities academic

recognizes adherents to positions radically alternative to his or her own as still being part of the

particular academic community. There are very few metaphysical idealists or ethical relativists

in philosophy, for example, but they are nonetheless considered members of the philosophical

community, and they are not “dissidents,” as they would be in the sciences.

A further consequence of this is that humanities communities do not “leave behind” the

justification for their theories or interpretative approaches. Because any theory or approach has

(at least potential) competitors, and because those competitors are never “off the table,” the

intra-community discussion can at any time come to be about the reason(s) for accepting one

theory or approach rather than another. It follows that the reasons in favor of a humanities

theory or approach — some of which may have been added long after the theory or approach

entered the community discourse — are, even if not currently being discussed in the

community, both readily available for discussion and more likely to be a relevant topic of

discussion than such reasons would be in the sciences.

The looming presence of justification for the theories or interpretive approaches that are

found in the humanities also has implications for humanities undergraduate teaching. Because

higher education teachers in the humanities teach their students things that are not (except by

chance) agreed upon by the entirety of their community, it is important that they discuss the

justification in favor of the particular theories or approaches they are considering. Humanities

teachers do not ask their students to simply accept a theory or interpretation that they discuss;

they feel that it is important to also analyze the reasons for accepting a theory or taking some

approach to interpreting art, dance, music, film, or literature. The same, as we saw, is not true of

teaching in the sciences. The reason for the omnipresence of justification in humanities teaching

is that humanities students do not inherit their epistemic position from the lecturer or from the

lecturer’s academic community. If a student’s epistemic position with respect to what the

lecturer discusses is going to change, it is going to have to be as the result of some effort of his

or her own.

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In a suggestive recent essay titled “Why Not to Trust Other Philosophers,” Charles

Heunemann writes that “philosophers are concerned first and foremost with coming to

understand something for themselves, or settle upon a belief through their own cognitive

resources.”14 I suspect that Heunemann may have overstated his point; I doubt that all

philosophers would agree that this is their “first and foremost” concern. Nonetheless, this is a

concern, and it is a concern that philosophers have for their students. It is reflected, perhaps

most prominently, in the attention that they give not just to positions but to reasons for

positions. They spend a great deal of time on reasons, and they expect their students to grasp

and engage with them. All of this is an acknowledgment that philosophy students’ changing

epistemic positions with respect to what they are taught derive from their own individual acts

of grasping the force of reasons.

Philosophy, of course, is not alone in acknowledging this feature of their field in their

teaching. A lecturer who offers his or her students an interpretation of, say, a novel will defend

that interpretation by appealing to details in the novel, the effect that the features of the work

have on its readers, the context in which the novel was written, or the personality or life of its

author. In all of these cases, the lecturer aims to have students grasp the appropriateness of the

case he or she is making: the students’ epistemic position with respect to this interpretation is

unchanged until they have reflected upon the effect that the novel or film has on them, or upon

the relevance and importance of certain details in the novel or about its author and his or her

life to their development of an understanding of the novel. Even though the student of literary

studies has been helped by the lecturer, and even though the reasons for what this student learns

(may) have come from the lecturer or the lecturer’s academic community, the reason(s) the

student has for accepting his or her newfound commitment to an interpretation of a novel will

not be inherited from anyone else. Just like the student of philosophy, the literary studies

student must achieve his or her new epistemic position through, as it were, individual effort.

Intellectual Humility and Confidence in Higher Education

Throughout this essay, I have been assuming that the ideal higher education teacher will

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encourage his or her students to reflect, so that the students will, in some manner or another,

grasp the kinds of considerations explored in the previous section. That is, the reflective higher

education teacher will encourage students to understand how they come to occupy the

epistemic positions that they do when they are in his or her classroom. When this happens —

when a higher education student grasps the kind of epistemic position that he or she has come

to occupy with respect to the lecturer and the relevant academic community — then such a

student will have made a step toward being intellectually humble and confident regarding

these subject matters in particular and sophisticated ways.

The virtues that I introduced in the second section, intellectual humility and confidence,

arise — at least in part — from an agent’s grasp of his or her epistemic position. The

intellectually humble person believes appropriately in response to a proper understanding of

the limits, boundaries, or weaknesses of his or her epistemic position, while the intellectually

confident person believes appropriately in light of having an accurate grasp of the strength or

scope of his or her epistemic situation. In this final section, I spell out how attentive and

reflective higher education students in both consensus-reaching communities and non-

consensus-reaching communities should emerge from their education having developed both of

these virtues, albeit in very different ways.

Those higher education students who are being taught the intellectual products of a

consensus-reaching community, such as physics or biology, and who have a reflective

understanding of how their epistemic position has changed in being taught, will realize that

their position has limitations, both insofar as it is wholly dependent upon the community and

insofar as they themselves do not understand the reasons based upon which the community has

accepted the claims at hand.15 This does not mean that these students are less justified in

believing what they do than those who do understand the reasons why the community has

accepted the claim, or that they cannot have knowledge of these claims just as some others do.

Rather, the limitation is a matter of their epistemic position being one in which they depend in a

quite fundamental way upon someone else’s having or having had access to those reasons. An

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adequate grasp of this feature of much of what they have learned should lead science students

to a kind of intellectual humility: they will understand that they have inherited their position

from a community to which they (as yet) do not belong. If students in the natural sciences

become intellectually humble with respect to scientific beliefs in general — as they hopefully

will — they will hold such beliefs in a way that reflects this limitation. Beliefs they form (inside

or outside of the classroom) about, for example, the effect that human beings are having on the

global environment, the relation between HIV and AIDS, the chemical composition of water,

the importance of vitamins, or, indeed, just about anything they learn from a medical doctor,

will be beliefs whose justification is understood only by others. If and when they come to know

these things, they do so by virtue of a justification that someone else has.

Ideally, however, reflective higher education students in a consensus-reaching subject

area will also come to appreciate the strength of their epistemic position, for these students will

recognize that their new beliefs have the backing of a community of professionals who have

agreed that there is good reason to believe what they have been taught. I am not claiming that

these students must have an account of the source of the justificatory power of consensus-

reaching academic communities; any such account would be complex and controversial, and it

would be unreasonable to demand that anyone have such an account before justifiably gaining

a belief from an academic community. What we should expect reflective students in the sciences

to grasp is that, however it is that the claim they have come to believe was first justified and

accepted by the community, and however it is that this communal acceptance warrants their own

acceptance of it, this claim has the backing of a community and the members of this community

understand and agree upon the justification for the claim. While these students should be

humble in light of the fact that their epistemic position is inherited, they should be confident

because they inherited it from the scientific community, a community that is largely concerned

with claims such as this and that has agreed upon this particular claim. Should these students

become properly intellectually confident about scientific beliefs in general, they would hold

their scientific beliefs in a way that displays this reflective understanding. So, even though they

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do not have access to the particular reasons behind, for example, the community’s agreement

that HIV causes AIDS, they would know that there are such reasons and that consensus has

been achieved based on them; otherwise, their lecturer would not have taught them that HIV

causes AIDS. Accordingly, the believing of reflective students will manifest the subjective

conviction that is appropriate to such recognition; they will recognize, for example, that they

themselves are neither in a position to question this claim, nor in a position to question other

scientific claims that have been similarly agreed upon. In addition, these students will see other,

similarly positioned people who question scientific claims as being unreasonable given their

lack of access to the evidence for the claims they question.

As we have seen, learning in the humanities and other non-consensus-reaching

academic communities is different. Reflective humanities students recognize both that their

epistemic position is in an important sense not inherited, but is rather an achievement of their

own, and that any claim they accept will not have the epistemic backing of the entire

community from which the claim came. In contrast to science students, reflective humanities

students will recognize that they are being asked to maintain a certain amount of epistemic

separation and independence from the lecturer and his or her academic community. While the

lecturer may endorse one position over another, he or she will make clear the reasons for this

endorsement, and students will be aware that competing positions are available. As with

science students, a reflective appreciation of the kind of epistemic position they occupy in

humanities learning well places humanities students to develop both intellectual humility and

confidence, although in very different ways from science students.

Reflective students in a non-consensus-reaching community recognize that their

epistemic position with respect to the subject matter they are being taught is not an inherited

one; rather, their learning is to a large extent a matter of their own effort. This kind of reflective

experience can lead to virtuous humility, because humanities students will realize that the

position they adopt may not have the agreement of their peers, the lecturer, or the academic

community to which the lecturer belongs, and that they are, essentially, on their own in coming

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to believe what they do. Should these students become intellectually humble in general with

respect to the subject matters of the humanities, this recognition will inform their future beliefs

in this domain. Always remembering that their occupancy of a particular position is the result

of their own efforts, humanities students will acknowledge that it may be they — and not those

who disagree with them — who have missed something. This kind of humility is closely related

to the virtue of intellectual openness; those who are open-minded acknowledge that they have a

great deal to learn from others.

On the other hand, however, reflective humanities students will realize that if they are

careful, they can have an insight, a belief worth having, even when accepting a particular claim

leaves them in the minority or alone. Even though a student may be the only one in the class

who accepts a position being discussed, this student can see him- or herself as being right or

justified in doing so; the student may think that everyone else has missed something or has not

quite understood the argument. The isolating epistemic experience of humanities learning can

be ennobling, and when a student recognizes it as such, this can signal that the student is

developing a virtuous confidence in his or her own cognitive capacities when applied to this

subject matter. Such a student will have a proper trust in his or her ability to think through the

kind of issues discussed in the humanities and will use and follow those capacities

appropriately in the presence of those who disagree.

Conclusion

The virtues of intellectual humility and confidence that I have been discussing in this

essay arise out of an understanding of the epistemic position one occupies with respect to

various domains. Such recognition is not sufficient for becoming intellectually virtuous in these

ways, as intellectual confidence and humility are not themselves states of awareness of one’s

epistemic position, but rather dispositions to believe in appropriate ways, dispositions that arise

out of such reflective awareness. Accordingly, this kind of reflective epistemic awareness is

necessary for developing these particular intellectual virtues and is the right starting point for

achieving both. However, grasping one’s own epistemic position is not always easy; on the

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contrary, it is in many cases a significant cognitive achievement, since epistemic positions can

be very sophisticated — as the examples of the sciences and the humanities that I have

discussed in this essay readily show. If this is right, and if I have been correct in assuming

(throughout this essay) that encouraging the development of intellectual virtues is an aim of

higher education, then it follows that educators in this context should encourage reflection upon

the kind of learning being done — that is, upon the epistemic positions their students are

attaining — in their classrooms.

If the preceding considerations are correct, then teachers in different academic

communities are in the position of being able to develop the same intellectual virtues —

humility and confidence — in their students, but they are doing so with respect to very different

epistemic positions. One kind of community helps instill a virtuously poised believing in the

face of dependence upon an academic community, while the other helps instill a virtuously

poised believing in the face of independence from others. In the natural sciences and other

consensus-reaching academic communities, reflective students become aware of their epistemic

dependence upon the community and its members’ agreement on a certain claim. This

dependence is both an epistemic limitation — because they have inherited their epistemic

position from the community — and an epistemic strength — because they have the backing of

that community. Accordingly, the intellectual confidence and humility that these students

hopefully develop would amount to an appropriate epistemic balance in the face of such

dependence and backing. In the humanities and other non-consensus-reaching academic

communities, reflective students become aware of their epistemic independence from the

lecturer and his or her community (an independence that mirrors that of each individual

member of the community itself). Reflective humanities students will see this independence as

both a position of epistemic weakness — because they will realize that they are, in a certain

sense, on their own — and a position of epistemic strength — insofar as they have discovered

that they can achieve an acceptable epistemic position on their own. In reflective humanities

students, then, we have an intellectual confidence and humility that, together, amount to an

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appropriate epistemic balance in view of the fact that they gain the epistemic position they take

up on their own.

With this in mind, it might be thought that higher education students should be

encouraged to study both the humanities and the sciences. I am inclined to agree that they

should be. On the one hand, our dependence upon consensus-reaching communities — such as

those in the natural sciences — has become more and more pervasive and important over the

past two centuries, and the epistemic position that we inherit from these communities has

become more intricate; one might conclude that this pervasiveness and importance justifies an

educational framework that will lead all students to an understanding of their relation to those

communities. On the other hand, areas of our lives studied in non-consensus-reaching

communities — such as those in the humanities — are and always will be pervasive, even as we

come to engage, say, with different kinds of narratives (for example, more film and less poetry)

and to think about ourselves and our relations with others in different ways. Considerations

such as these offer prima facie support for the advantage of encouraging both science and

humanities study at the higher education level, but an adequate defense of this claim would

need more attention than I can give it here.

1. I treat intellectual confidence and humility as “factive,” that is, as appropriate responses to a

correct view of one’s epistemic situation. While I do not deny that a believer can be virtuously

confident or humble in light of a false view of his or her position, I will ignore this possibility

here.

2. Robert C. Roberts and W. Jay Wood, “Humility and Epistemic Goods,” in Intellectual Virtue:

Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology, ed. Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2003), 258.

3. This is Roberts and Wood’s analysis of intellectual arrogance; see “Humility and Epistemic

Goods,” section 3.

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4. The example of virtuous silence comes from Samantha Vice, “Reflections on ‘How Do I Live

in This Strange Place?’” South African Journal of Philosophy 30, no. 4 (2011): 513–516. Also see

Roberts and Wood on caution, another intellectual virtue that is not always conceived as such, in

their Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2007), chap. 8.

5. Roberts and Wood, Intellectual Virtues, 234.

6. This will be, perhaps, more important in the humanities than it is in the sciences, for reasons

that I explore in the next section.

7. I will not speculate on why certain academic communities aim for consensus while others do

not. This is a large and complex topic, one that occupies (explicitly or implicitly) much work in

the philosophy of science.

8. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1970).

9. Kuhn, postscript to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, section 6.

10. Michael Cherry, “African Scientists Join Colleagues in Affirming HIV’s Role in AIDS,”

Nature 406, no. 6791 (July 6, 2000): 3, [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v406/n6791/. I

have discussed this case and the questions it raises for testimony from science in Ward E. Jones,

“Dissident Versus Loyalist: Which Scientists Should We Trust?” Journal of Value Inquiry 36, no. 4

(2002): 511–520.

11. Since the mid-1980s, sociologists of science have sought to understand the mechanisms of

consensus-formation in science. For a recent addition to this literature, see Uri Shwed and Peter

S. Bearman, “The Temporal Structure of Scientific Consensus Formation,” American Sociological

Review 75, no. 6 (2010): 817–840.

12. The claim I am making here is neutral as to whether students must have “positive reason” to

believe that which the lecturer tells them is true. The “reductionist” says that they must; see, for

example, Elizabeth Fricker, “Against Gullibility,” in Knowing from Words: Western and Indian

Philosophical Analysis of Understanding and Testimony, ed. Bimal Krishna Malital and Arindam

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Chakrabarti (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1994). The “nonreductionist,” on the other

hand, denies this; see, for example, John McDowell, “Knowledge by Hearsay,” also in Knowing

from Words, ed. Malital and Chakrabarti.

13. I do not deny that much of what a student in the sciences learns coheres together and that

this coherence gives the student some reason to believe what he or she has learned. However,

the coherence of the claims that the science student is asked to accept only emerges — as it did

in the communities themselves — over time, after the student has been asked to accept a great

deal.

14. Charles Heunemann, “Why Not to Trust Other Philosophers,” American Philosophical

Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2004): 257.

15. Joseph Kupfer emphasizes dependence as a central element in humility in his essay “The

Moral Perspective of Humility,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 84, no. 3 (2003): section 2.

Acknowledgments

THANKS TO Jason Baehr, Tessa Dewhurst, Richard Flockemann, Lindsay Kelland, Thad Metz,

Mary Margaret O’Hara, and to members of three audiences at Rhodes University: at a

colloquium, “The Aims of Higher Education,” organized by Pedro Tabensky, as well as in the

philosophy department and education faculty.