Epistemic humility

I’ll try to remember this next time I suggest that someone check his privilege. How can I know how much privilege another has? And if I assume based on that person’s race or gender, doesn’t that assumption make me something of a racist/sexist? Maybe better to never make such a presumptuous suggestion in the first place.

The first thing that came to mind reading this is whether there’s value in considering differences between person A’s innate experiences (e.g. racism, sexism) where just as much as person B doesn’t know what it’s like to experience it, person A has never not experienced it (aware or not), and their discrete experiences (e.g. the loss of a child, catastrophic injury) where person A may remember a time when they were more like person B. I have no idea whether this would be the case.

My second thought was this category is essentially boundless. There is a fair body of evidence to suggest that one’s quality of life is greatly affected by common variations in height or perceived attractiveness by others. If you assume this (essentially, an idea of complete uniqueness), then than question could be phrased more along the lines of “In trying to relate to this person right now, at what point does our affiliation overcome our differences (or vice versa)?”

Then I thought about Fundamental Attribution Error and Actor/Observer Bias, and at that point I decided I was off topic.

This is why novels are more important than monographs. They won’t necessarily give you access to real experiences, but they can have the potential to grant some sort of imaginative empathy.

This post touches on a such a compelling problem to me, which is how do we encourage this kind of humility – which I agree, we need so much more of – while still being able to make judgments for the sake of politics?

The very first comment gets at this. Almost certainly, your average white male babyboomer has no idea what it is like to deal with racism on a daily basis. Yet I, as a white female born into privilege in 1983, also have no idea what it was like for that white male babyboomer to experience becoming a “self-made” man. I might know intellectually – indeed I can amass a huge amount of historical knowledge that also critiques the very idea that he was, in reality, so self-made – but I will never know in the deeper sense being evoked here.

So I owe it to him, I think, to acknowledge this and do my best to keep this in mind so that I might remain empathic to all people, even when I wildly disagree with them. But there’s the rub. At the end of the day, I still want to say to this person: thank you for sharing your experience, but I still think your views are more informed by racism and sexism than you realize, and that’s not a good thing. At which point they would just blink back at me, tell me I don’t know what I am talking about, and the conversation would be over.

So, in other words, how do we cultivate humility and encourage empathy while still holding everyone accountable to a larger social responsibility; ie, how do we justify saying, I theoretically understand how insulted you felt by those lazy, shallow hippies you lived with while you worked your way through college, BUT, this is still not a good reason to vote for conservatives who destroy the welfare state?

“This post touches on a such a compelling problem to me, which is how do we encourage this kind of humility – which I agree, we need so much more of – while still being able to make judgments for the sake of politics?”

Political theorists are wont to argue that studying historical political thought helps us do this. Certainly studying Gadamer, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Edward Said can teach us about our epistemic limits and how those limits are enforced by our past (i.e. hermeneutics) and our immediate surroundings, both physical (phenomenology) and discursive (language, ideology). Although I will quibble with your phrasing “judgement for the sake of politics” because it presents judgment as neutral, when judgment is always already political.

Ingrid Robeyns: “Somehow it strikes me as wise, and possibly even as a precondition for social justice, if we would rehabilitate epistemic humility at the core of our educational and social practices.”

I don’t entirely understand why some social sciences seem (from an outsiders perspective – maybe this is not the case if you are within the disciplines and read articles and books regularly, so I could be leaping to conclusions) to have not gone through the concern with othering people (especially those who might have less power), authorial etc self-reflexivity, or the linguistic turn and that sort of thing? Although I did ask an economics professor who taught part of a required subject I took and he said epistemology was more of a concern of economics as a discipline in the 1980s, I’m not sure if this is right?

In terms of expressing humility to others, it is possibly more about words and gestures and so forth. Although I don’t know that you would want to or be able to be humble consistently, because you might find yourself cross, or wanting to come to the defense of something, or to contradict someone, as other commenters have said. Although I’m not sure that you mean humility like being meek and mild, or humility as a sort of responsiveness to the realities of others?

When you say we don’t know as much as we might assume we know do you mean we shouldn’t present as a nominally objective/distanced observer “I live in the World rather as a spectator of Mankind, than as one of the Species” – Joseph Addison. The Australian historian Greg Dening wrote about those that assumed the position of observer in the Enlightenment era:

“Irony was the enlightened’s trope. It allowed the response to any romantic idea of the South Seas to be one of ribald laughter. The theatre of native Tahiti was the theatre of the grotesque in which native ‘queens’ with ‘sunburnt bums’ and ‘tattooed breeches’ did not get it quite right in their mimicry of the truly civilised….
The theatre of the grotesque is more hegemonic than that, though. It screens the violence of the encounter.”

But in writing that about “the enlightened” he wasn’t adopting a position of humility towards them. So, I think you must be discriminating to some degree, not simply humble towards all and sundry, unless you happen to be genuinely like that naturally (but I can’t think of anyone I’ve ever known like that all the time myself) – sometimes you would prefer to show you disapprove of something.

Death in the family is an extremely dramatic and (typically) rare event. I wouldn’t generalize from that to more common phenomena; most of everybody knows what it’s like to feel like an outsider, or be treated unfairly. The normal empathy works well there.

Another thing is that experiencing something doesn’t always help; you have to be able to relate to the person, to their state of mind. I used to be a teenager, but I don’t understand them now, it’s hard to relate.

Caring for an autistic child is a unfortunate example, because it’s also a situation where epistemic humility is exploited to push an agenda. Why do we care what some model without a college degree thinks about the causes of autism? Because she has an autistic child. How dare you contradict her about something you have no experience of?

How dare you contradict her about something you have no experience of?

True. I mean, I’ve never had a degree in developmental neurochemistry, so I make a point not to contradict people who have had one about the insight that experience offers them into the human condition.

It seems very odd to me to think of a death in the family as somehow rare. Most people will outlive their parents, and will live to see other relatives die too – it’s one of the most common experiences of humans and many other animals, I’d think. Not that I didn’t already know that Mao’s a character from Robert Charles Wilson’s Mysterium and the alternate Earth therein.

My own approach is two-fold:

#1. Make sure I’m taking time to listen to people whose lives are significantly different from mine. Not to “talk to” them, or talk at them, just to pay attention to how they talk about the big and small events of these lives with aspects mine doesn’t have.

#2. Keep checking the policies I support to make them as un-dependent as I can on epistemic assumptions from my own kind of life.

And that’s about it. It’s an ongoing thing.

I agree that describing death in the family as a dramatic and relatively rare event is strange. Certainly, suffering the death of your child is awful and relatively rare, but in families generally? What else does the very eldest generation do? Your great-grand-parents, your grandparents? I was with my grandmother when she died, my father’s mother. I got to be with her for a little while by myself after my dad drove my brother home to rest and before the people from the hospice came, maybe 4 o’clock in the morning, or 4:30 by then. It was strange. It was nice! She smelled like herself, powdery. She was even smaller than before, after she left, like a little bird tangled up in the covers, just skin and bones. Not a scary thing. I laid across her and cried, and even then I thought, we should see death more. She chose to die at home. She wanted what we all want: no tubes and wires; no loud machines; no drip; no smell of piss and Lysol. We should help people die like that if that’s what they want, and see their bodies. For death to be a rare thing in a family is very wonderful! I wish it may last you a long time. But it is strange, too. I hope it will last me, too, a long while now.

Phil @ 8

>>How can Lynn claim ignorance concerning the meaning of a wors while she is posting to the internet. Can’t she just look it up?<>Somehow it strikes me as wise, and possibly even as a precondition for social justice, if we would rehabilitate epistemic humility at the core of our educational and social practices.<<

I assume social practices means our interactions with each other (which I addressed in my comment) and maybe our social institutions. But "epistemic humility at the core of our educational practices"—teach philosophy students to be more humble in thinking they know something?" I don't know how that would look in practice unless it was endless epistemological (and therefore, surely, moral) relativism.

Maybe this is simpler than I think it is, coming as I do from the outside. Maybe —maybe!—it means stop being so patriarchal in our dealings with each other, both as individuals and socio-politically. Those in power thinking they know what's best for everyone, and acting accordingly.

You don’t know people who were raised by their grandmothers — a common thing in modern Black America.

Lynne @22

“teach philosophy students to be more humble in thinking they know something?” I don’t know how that would look in practice unless it was endless epistemological (and therefore, surely, moral) relativism.”

It is hard to imagine it exactly in practice, yes, but on the otherhand philosophers would not as often be working with what they so often present as beng a certain sort of unworldly all knowing philosophical actor – a writing device which is curiously old fashioned. Perhaps a more humble philosophy that accepts it is part of the thing it seeks to study and influence would be refreshing.

@ZM “But in writing that about “the enlightened” he wasn’t adopting a position of humility towards them”

To be fair, “the enlightened” are not entirely diminished/destroyed in the piece either – but they are ‘seen’ as subjects through their legacy of observations, as much as those they observed, and both are made part of Dening’s performance:

“‘Savages speak to us, if at all, ventriloquially – in our own words’, [Rennie] writes in his brief preface. This is no expression of a post-colonial angst…. The fact, fetched and found, is that these strangers – Rennie’s ventriloquists – saw more than their own reflections in the otherness they described. True, they saw the native peoples ‘through a glass darkly’. Yet there was, and is, still much to be seen: of how these islanders peopled their ‘Ocean of Islands’… before they were ‘discovered’…..Two hundred years of translating what these islanders said of themselves in somebody else’s transcription of their language is too much of an idea of the South Seas to throw away.”

For that matter, I have a friend (white, incidentally) who at 67 is already a great-grandfather twice over. His daughter was pregnant at 17; her daughter at the same age. He may well be a great-great-grandfather the way things are going.

14: I also think it is wrong to assume that you know what it’s like for another person when they have roughly the same experience you have–or at least superficially. Divorce utterly guts some people and others sail through without much damage, for example. I imagine there are many experiences that vary and it would seem not terribly humble to assume that our loss of a parent is precisely the same as another’s loss of a parent.

Yes, although really the strong version of this goes all the way to an uncomfortable solipsism: there’s no way to know what anything is like for someone else. Humility about the limitations of one’s own perception as it relates to others, as has been suggested in other comments here, ought to extend to beyond things for which we adopt categories we culturally conceive of as equivalent.

A while back, I had cancer. Seven and a half months of chemo, during which my wife took care of me and everything else. After it was over, we talked about it. In the end, we concluded that I had no idea what it was like to take care of someone you loved who had cancer and she had now idea what it was like to have cancer. We both saw what was happening to the other, but we didn’t know what it *felt* like. While it’s happening, whatever *it* is, what matters is what’s happening. After it’s over, what matters is how you *felt* about it. And only you know that.

Not sure if this is on topic, but though my daughter almost certainly isn’t on the autism spectrum, she does have very mild sensory processing issues, of the type that when they’re more severe are associated with autism. She also has a few personality traits that might lead an untrained person to wonder if she is on the spectrum. So there are things she doesn’t like to touch–when she was younger, would not touch, sometimes didn’t want to look at. I’ve been surprised that in several years, every teacher she’s had has just assumed she doesn’t like to get messy, in a finicky feminine way, (and probably that I don’t like her to get messy) even though there are a few other situations (food dislikes, etc., though fewer over the years) where the same issue also shows up. This affects, I think, how they are going to deal with her refusal to do things–whether to encourage her to try to touch new things, or whether they’re going to let it slide.

“I should hope that most people here hate the fucking Eagles.”

I like the Eagles….

In response to the OP, I have a lot more understanding for people dealing with mental illness since I have started suffering from acute anxiety. It really makes a big difference in your perspective.

@39

fwiw, reading back my 31 reads a little pedantic, rather than curious (which was how I meant it), sorry if that was how it came across!

MPAVictoria@39
In the blame utilitarianism thread another commenter criticised me (i think?) for bringing up Peter Singer’s demeanour, rather than concentrating on his writing. But demeanour etc, if you want to call it that, I think discloses something about us that writing doesn’t necessarily (although this of course works in reverse as well) directly address. If I am suffering badly from insomnia it affects my writing etc, but I wouldn’t necessarily directly disclose that (although my demeanour at the time i think expresses it more). I hope your anxiety resolves itself soon.

“I hope your anxiety resolves itself soon.”
Thank you ZM. I hope your insomnia lets up as well.

“my 31 reads a little pedantic”

That’s probably because Theophylact’s stereotyping was a little weird. African-Americans are raised by their grandparents? African-Americans have young grandparents? WTF was that all about?

Mao Cheng Ji et al: If you happen to have read it, you might remember there’s this time when Proust (OK his gauzily fictionalized protagonist) is at the summer hotel and he thinks for a moment that his grandmother is in the adjoining room, where she always used to sleep, and then he realizes that’s she’s not there–that she’ll never be there, not ever again? And suddenly his mind coalesces around the idea that his mother has been living–truly living–with this awful, blank gap in the fabric of life for almost two years already? While he, who has gone to the damn funeral, and made murmuring sympathetic noises to his mother, has never understood, until now, in a moment of anxiety in which he wishes to be able to open that door and find her there, that his grandmother has been dropped from the warp and weft of time like an unneeded stitch, and all the rest weaves on seamlessly without her, as if she never was? That it is only his panicked reaching out for her, his failure to grasp her infinitely soothing hand, that remains to show she ever was? Yeah, well, um, remember it. Or, just read what I told you. Which might be pretty mangled, really, because I read it a long time ago. Also, this isn’t a battle rap and not everyone needs to read Proust, I hasten to add. I am not actually trolling my own blog right this very second. It’s just very poignant to me and when I think of it I do feel tears in my eyes.

I read Remembrance of Things Past two years before my grandmother died, and she was a Francophile who had lived in Paris before her life-long palsy reeled the line slowly in and drew her life into a spiral, tighter and tighter. For six years before she died she was in her bed all day and all night, and for ten before that she got up and got dressed perfectly, every day, with jewelry and perfume and a scarf and all that was lovely, and was helped to a chaise in her living room, where she stayed until dinner, and then back to the bedroom twelve feet away. And I had so much fun talking with her about it! (She had read it in French, naturally. Actually, she and my maternal grandmother were two classes apart at Vassar. And their families even had homes only a few miles apart in Darien, CT when they were young! Not, like, full-time homes, but. It’s a small world! Ha ha ha. Ha. I mean, it would be a small world if the US were ruled by some sort of self-perpetuating oligarchy, but that’s impossible, so this is just a happy coincidence.) I am ill now, but not as ill as she, I’m grateful; I am typing this on the tray I use to eat on in bed, having just had some pineapple and a soda water. I think of her every day. I was ill before too, but not like this. When I get upset and snap at my family because I’m in pain I think of how serene she was, of how badly she suffered, how brave she was. Sometimes I wake up at night and think of things I did or said to her that weren’t kind, or were manipulative, or unpleasant. I want to take everything back. I want to have her just for ten minutes, just to tell her how sorry I am, how I messed things up, how I always loved her. I want to show her my daughters. She would have loved them so, so much. Especially Zoe. Well, no one can help loving Violet, she’s the most cheerful, funny, kind sweet, full of love person I’ve every met. But Zoe can be gloomy. But Zoe would sit quietly with my grandmother and draw or paint; my grandmother would love that best of all things. I still dream about her all the time. Once I had a wonderful dream that she and I were lying in bed side by side, in the two narrow beds punctuated by an English two-drawer dresser and a table lamp with a wobbly shade that are the Form of the Guest Room. We were watching television and I said we should turn it off, so we did, and then she got up! She said we should go outside, and so we did, into the country but not in Georgia, in Darien. She was faster than me and she was running up a little hill in front of me. I was chasing her but partly I was just laughing that she was running like that, like a little child. It was springtime, and the grass was green but the dirt was cold, and there were daffodills, and narcissus. We were barefoot. When I got to the top of the hill it was so beautiful, everything white and palest pink. She said it was the pear orchard she used to play in when she was a child in Darien, and right next to the dirt road where her butler taught her how to drive. She said that James was here, that it was the one thing she worried about most, the thing she was afraid of, but he was. I got to hug her and kiss her and really feel her and really smell her. I told her I was sorry it was only a dream but she said it was one of the best things about dreams–we can see the people we have lost again. I didn’t want to lose her in the dark trunks and snowdrifts of petals but of course I did. It doesn’t matter though. She was strong, and young, and happy. Everything springtime. A small part of me–no, that’s a lie, a really huge part of me wants that to be real: her healthy and happy, and James alive, and the black dirt cold, and the wind snatching the white-pink petals up away into the sky. Forever.

Belle Waring, why? You just made me well up. Like, before this, it was just Henri D. Mao, and v easy to ignore!

My grandmother is pretty much who I spent every day with growing up—because both my parents worked full-time jobs. When she died, I was continents away and couldn’t go back (tho maybe also I didn’t want to). When I was back in the old country a few months later though, I cried almost every day.

(Also though, I need to make clear that my grandmother rocked seriously way hard, and not necessarily in the traditional ways.)

Thank you, Belle. That was wonderful.

A quick question – what is the difference (conceptual, emotive – I am looking mainly for a concrete value, as far as that is possible) between “epistemic humility” and “checking your privilege?” In both cases it seems that we’re making demands of people; I would hope it’s because of some kind of value that we can grasp.

About Belle’s post above – it illustrates the point of the original post that not only is this kind of story opaque and dense for some of us, like a curtain of abandoned spider’s web black with age and care, which you have no intention of pushing through. Sometimes the fights of those others, since gone, also still provoke righteous indignation even though we don’t know what they were going through – impenetrable, but severe and even unjust. My literary allusion would be to the simultaneous sorrow and anger the monk Fushou, from “The Roof Tile of Tempyo,” feels after a reminder of the pressure exerted by a withered, fanatical monk they encountered trying to transport his life’s work, copied Buddhist scrolls, from China back to Japan – when the net result of all those years of care is a vision in the night for Fusho of the ship carrying the monk and his scrolls cracking in two, the scrolls sinking to the bottom of the ocean; a lifetime for naught. And this on top of the fact that our monk Fusho and his companions had spent decades on the repeated attempts to return from China to Japan, losing friends to disease, and opportunities to the force of worry for the original mission. Nobody, it seems, is completely isolated from futility.

I have always been raised to feel that some stories should be private, and the rationale for that is especially clear when you feel you can’t share the stories of grandparents whose battles provoke not tears of sympathy and joy, but the feeling of staring at a narrow void under the stairs, inhabited by strangers, caught up in battles separating them from you, by what seemed to be choice, in a way that certainly evoked no sense of epistemic humility for your good. When can we ever condemn anybody? At this point, the reality of a family internally divided has provoked in me a kind of resignation and a determination to do what is right by myself, and to let others choose their own course.

So as a postscript to all of this, I’ll just say that epistemic humility does not (to me) seem to guarantee feelings of respect or loving loss. I wonder if it’s just a matter of common sense to discern between epistemic humility and what is elsewhere called moral relativism. Thanks for your thoughts, everyone.

Yeah, well, that’s just like my opinion, man.

I should hope that most people here hate the fucking Eagles, man.

Man, I show no epistemic humility to people who do not hate the Eagles.

Breaking news- the world is being taken over a new technocracy. And I, for one, welcome our new technocratic overlords.:)

> Somehow it strikes me as wise, and possibly even as a precondition for social justice,
> if we would rehabilitate epistemic humility at the core of our educational and
> social practices.

This makes sense. Except that it does not apply to me. This is because this argument does not apply to two categories : (a) people of Jewish origin (because they are already humble in so many ways that while it is clear that being humble may increase social welfare, it is not clear that being humble in specific contexts C1, C2,… , Cn is socially optimal) and (b) people with 150 plus IQs. Because there may be a real value for these people to -not- be humble because with that type of intelligence, it may be socially optimal to have these people actually say things even if they are not being humble while saying it . Also, it is impossible for these people to be truly humble because they know so much more than others and so that would simply be ‘giving false evidence’ in its own way. And we know ‘giving false evidence’ is verboten.

I will let you decide whether I belong to category (a) or category (b). Or both ;) A related question- should one be humble on Crooked Timber? I am not sure anyone can prove that the answer to this is ‘Yes’.

It is important to show epistemic humility in day-to-day life, of course. Otherwise, one would be completely insufferable.

Thank you for the nice responses, everyone. I didn’t mean to give the impression above that I have had it rough. I’m able to look on this whole business with a kind of bemusement, and I have said many times that “it’s been an education.”

I agree wholeheartedly with AJ’s comment that intent is important. At the same time, intent from others is something that seems to be completely mysterious to us. (After all, philosophers often stipulate that solipsism is not a serious area of discussion, for the sake of discussion). A related factor is what the law calls the “reasonable person” test – every person’s own natural reaction to a situation being assumed good. Personally, I probably err too much on the side of assuming good intent on the part of others, but on the other hand I can’t say that I am very often in situations where my “reasonable person’s view” is challenged so much that I have trouble controlling myself. It must also be very uncommon for somebody to naturally assume that their own reactions to events are unreasonable – if they relate such a feeling to others, they will be counseled to have trust in themselves, typically (sociopaths are one of the cases that break this from being a universal model, again). We have lots of inklings, but there’s no universally accepted models along these lines. Perhaps it’s supposed to be only “good enough.”

I am a bit mystified about AJ’s escape clauses (a) and (b). Two general types of situations come to mind here: One is being in the position of a learner. The other situation is being in the position of a judge of others. There’s a definition I think is implied intended by Belle Waring’s and Ingrid Robeyns’ responses, which is that epistemic humility is concerned with the motives of others, in addition to describing what sorts of things they could know.

Perhaps where AJ’s comment breaks into the discussion is that mention of game theory. So how far does probability get us? Certainly, mathematics (and related things) seem to have some different relationship to the truth than do relatively questionable matters of phenomena to be decided empirically.

If I understand it correctly, AJ’s suggestion is that in some cases you can recast the question from being one of “how accurate am I likely to be?” (which is actually still a probabilistic one) to “how worthwhile is my contribution going to be?”

Hopefully I can say, and have it understood in good humor, that one’s particular ancestry and heritage actually locks one into a way of thinking, and that is far from the privileged viewpoint from “outside and above” the universe that a person would need to be able to claim to escape the criticism of improper perspective. Hopefully that is just obvious.

Ingrid “I think there are many cases of undiagnosed autism. A number of these people will be considered ‘privileged’ and seen as being ‘difficult’ or not very social people, but many of those people would be judged much milder if people were to judge them as begin a person with Asperger’s trying to navigate the neurotypical world.”

The example you cited was of a conference etc, where people were of equal or equalish standing I presume. Perhaps socially these people should be kind to the academic in question (tho this makes me think of d2 recent exchanges with David graeber, wherein he told him to the effect that people would sidle away from graeber at cocktail parties).

But I don’t think being kind to people socially is the same as being able to evaluate the merit of their work. If say a professor with Asbergers recommended eugenics or something, I think the other professors ought to denounce that call, regardless of having sympathy for the Aspergers.

It was a reference to The Big Lebowski. It was funny.

I actually haven’t seen it either, but I’ve read about it, and the scene is on youtube. The standard reason for hating the Eagles is that as their songs make clear, lyrically and otherwise, they’re a bunch of douchebags. The song to which I alluded, which is entitled “Get Over It,” is, I think, the prime example of this, and is, I think, their worst song, among those I’ve heard on the radio. If one does not grasp the funniness of a joke, no amount of explanation will rectify the problem; in fact it will be counterproductive.

Now I’m going to go outside and see if I can figure out where this “connection box” might be.

There’s also a song called Glenn Frey Must Die. It, too, is funny.

OK, now this whole conversation is getting funny.

And Glenn Frey himself one supposedly jumped onstage and joined in on a performance of Glenn Frey Must Die, so that’s one non-douchebag point for him.

Correction: Don Henley.

“I laid across her and cried, and even then I thought, we should see death more.”

To Belle, My husband’s grandmother’s death was like your grandmother’s – inspiring. But very different than the deaths I experienced with my parents. I think perhaps we should witness the deaths of old people more. But having watched both my parents struggle and die of cancer when relatively young, I cannot agree that “we should see death more.”

My wife died of cancer last year, aged 49. Since then I’ve found that I share a special understanding with similar widows and widowers. Many other people have been kind, but it’s much better if they say “I can’t imagine how you feel” than “I know how you feel”.