Is Intellectual Humility Compatible with Political Conviction?

Abstract

Intellectual humility is often proposed, these days, as an antidote to the profound lack of respect, tolerance, and openness to other views in contemporary politics. Moreover, deficiencies of intellectual humility are clearly at work in now-familiar displays, in political discourse, of arrogance, dogmatism and related phenomena, like polarization. Although we agree that there are roles for intellectual humility, we identify two problems. First, previous research on the relationship between intellectual humility and political conviction has ignored empirical and theoretical work indicating that humility does often result in apathy or lack of political conviction. Second, there are different forms or kinds of intellectual humility which can relate to political conviction in many ways. We end the paper by describing a kind of political quietism, which includes quite different accounts of the nature of intellectual humility.