© LOGOS & EPISTEME, VII, 4 (2016): 409-411 INTRODUCTION1 J. Adam CARTER, Jesper KALLESTRUP, and Duncan PRITCHARD While it is widely regarded that intellectual humility is among the intellectual virtues, there is as of yet little consensus on the matter of what possessing and exercising intellectual humility consists in, and how it should be best understood as advancing our epistemic goals.2 For example, does intellectual humility involve an underestimation of one's intellectual abilities, or rather, does it require an accurate conception? Is intellectual humility a fundamentally interpersonal/social virtue, or might it be valuable to exercise in isolation? To what extent does intellectual humility demand of us an appreciation of how the success of our inquiries depends on features of our social and physical environment beyond our control?3 These are just a few of the many questions that are crucial to getting a grip on this intellectual virtue and why we might aspire to cultivate it. Furthermore, and apart from the nature and value of humility, it is worthwhile to consider how this notion, properly understood, might have import for other philosophical debates, including those about (for example) scepticism, assertion, epistemic individualism and anti-individualism, and the philosophy of education. This special issue brings together a range of different philosophical perspectives on 1 The editors would like to acknowledge that this special issue has benefitted from two grants awarded by the Templeton Foundation-the 'Intellectual Humility MOOC' and 'Philosophy, Science and Religion Online' project-hosted at the University of Edinburgh's Eidyn research centre. 2 For some representative discussions, see for example Ian M. Church and Peter L. Samuelson, Intellectual Humility: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Science (London: Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming); Dennis Whitcomb, Heather Battaly, Jason Baehr, and Daniel HowardSnyder, "Intellectual Humility: Owning Our Limitations," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 91, 1 (2015); Alessandra Tanesini, "Intellectual Humility as Attitude," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93, 1 (2016); Ian James Kidd, "Intellectual Humility, Confidence, and Argumentation," Topoi 35, 2 (2016): 395–402; Robert C. Roberts and W. Jay Wood, Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 3 For an overview of how knowledge might depend on such factors, see Jesper Kallestrup and Duncan Pritchard, "Robust Virtue Epistemology and Epistemic Anti-Individualism," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 93, 1 (2012): 84–103. Cf., Mark Alfano, "Expanding the Situationist Challenge to Responsibilist Virtue Epistemology," The Philosophical Quarterly 62, 247 (2012): 223–249. J. Adam Carter, Jesper Kallestrup, and Duncan Pritchard 410 these and related questions to do with intellectual humility with an aim to contributing to this important and timely topic. The volume begins with Ian M. Church's contribution "The Doxastic Account of Intellectual Humility," which defends a specific account of the nature of intellectual humility. Church begins by critiquing the 'low concern for status account'4 and the 'limitations-owning account'5 and defends by contrast a proposal according to which intellectual humility involves accurately tracking what one could non-culpably take to be the positive epistemic status of one's own beliefs. In their contribution "I Know You Are, but What am I? Anti-Individualism in the Development of Intellectual Humility and Wu-Wei," Mark Alfano and Brian Robinson engage with the issue of how intellectual humility is acquired. Taking as a starting point Edward Slingerland's work on the paradoxical virtue of wu-wei,6 Alfano and Robinson note that certain ways of aiming to become intellectually humble might be paradoxical or self-undermining. Alfano and Robinson's way out of the puzzle is markedly anti-individualistic:7 on the proposal they sketch, other people and shared values are to be understood as partial bearers of a given individual's intellectual humility. Modesto Gomez Alonso, in his contribution "Cartesian Humility and Pyrrhonian Passivity: The Ethical Significance of Epistemic Agency," connects the topic of intellectual humility with Cartesian and Pyrrhonian scepticism. In particular, Gomez Alonso argues that, in so far as intellectual humility is a virtue, we have reason to embrace a Cartesian rather than an ethically motivated Pyrrhonian model of rational guidance.8 In their contribution "Knowledge, Assertion and Intellectual Humility," J. Adam Carter and Emma C. Gordon argue that considerations about intellectual humility have a role to play in debates about epistemic norms governing 4 Roberts and Wood, Intellectual Virtues. 5 Whitcomb et al., "Intellectual Humility." 6 Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity (New York: Crown, 2014). 7 For some contemporary discussions of anti-individualism more generally, see, along with Kallestrup and Pritchard, "Robust Virtue Epistemology and Epistemic Anti-Individualism," also Sanford C. Goldberg, Anti-Individualism: Mind and Language, Knowledge and Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and S. Orestis Palermos, "Spreading the Credit: Virtue Reliabilism and Weak Epistemic Anti-Individualism," Erkenntnis 81, 2 (2016): 305–334. 8 For an overview of the Pyrrhonian conception of 'belief', see for example the papers in Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede, The Original Sceptics: A Controversy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). Introduction 411 assertion.9 In particular, Carter and Gordon contend that the epistemic value of intellectual humility in social-epistemic practice poses a special problem for proponents of the knowledge norm of assertion10 according to which one is properly epistemically positioned to assert that p if one knows that p. Alessandra Tanesini, in her contribution "Teaching Virtue: Changing Attitudes," approaches the topic of humility via its modesty component, and its surrounding vices. Tanesini argues that modesty does not require underestimation of one's epistemic abilities nor indifference toward one's intellectual successes; rather, she argues that it is an attitude directed at one's epistemic successes which serves knowledge and value-expressive functions, and whose opposing vices are arrogance and self-abasement.11 Tanesini concludes by considering the pedagogical implications of her account. Finally, in "Humility, Listening and 'Teaching in a Strong Sense,'" Andrea R. English, like Tanesini, engages with pedagogical implications of intellectual humility; her central question is whether one must have intellectual humility in order to teach. English's position is that humility is implied in the concept of teaching, provided teaching is construed in a strong sense such that it is linked to students' embodied experiences, in particular students' experiences of limitation. Furthermore, English argues that that humility is acquired through the practice of teaching. 9 See Jennifer Lackey, "Norms of Assertion," Noûs 41, 4 (2007): 594–626 for an accessible overview of some of the key positions in this debate. 10 See, for example, Timothy Williamson, "Knowing and Asserting," Philosophical Review 105, 4 (1996): 489–523; Knowledge and Its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 11 For some of Tanesini's related work on intellectual arrogance, see Alessandra Tanesini, "I- 'Calm Down, Dear:' Intellectual Arrogance, Silencing and Ignorance," Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 90, 1 (2016): 71–92.