How do intellectual virtues promote good thinking and knowing?

Spiegel’s account of open-mindedness and intellectual humility

Following Hare (2003), Spiegel (2012) defines open-mindedness as an attitude that one has toward one’s beliefs (p. 28); specifically, entertaining the possibility that one can entertain doubts about whether those beliefs are correct. He further distinguishes between this ‘first-order’ definition of open-mindedness, and recognizing one’s fallibility as a thinker and knower, a form of ‘second-order open-mindedness’ that he characterizes as intellectual humility.

On this account, open-mindedness and intellectual humility are virtues that can mutually reinforce each other to produce good thinking and knowing. One advantage of this view is that it underscores the fact that promoting good thinking and knowing requires the possession of more than one intellectual virtue (Spiegel, 2012: 35). To provide one recent example in line with this view, Porter et al. (2021) advanced a new classification framework of a specific intellectual virtue – intellectual humility – that synthesizes the philosophical and psychological research literatures. On this view, two components – one self-regarding and one other-regarding – are necessary and sufficient for intellectual humility. Recognition of intellectual limitations – the self-regarding component – is necessary, but not sufficient because it is conceivable that someone could acknowledge their intellectual limitations yet be dismissive of the knowledge of others. The other-regarding component could be characterized by, but not be limited to, open-mindedness, curiosity, and intellectual charity. This dynamic highlights how, similar to Spiegel’s account, core features of specific intellectual humility accounts are arguably dependent on other virtues. In other words, the intellectual humility framework identified above attempts to understand how different constructs mutually reinforce each other to foster good thinking and knowing (Jayawickreme and Fleeson, in press).

While Spiegel (2012) focuses on open-mindedness and intellectual humility in his essay, being a good thinker and knower likely requires more than these two virtues. In addition, there is the question of the necessary intellectual virtues and the minimal degree of each required. The core features of good thinking likely combines many attributes, including the possession of specific meta-cognitive skills and abilities, an awareness of one’s ignorance and cognitive fallibility, an openness to admitting one’s faults and limitations of knowledge while maintaining a sense of firmness about one’s current beliefs, an appreciation of the viewpoints of others, an open-minded attitude toward listening to and engaging with others’ beliefs, having questioning skills characteristic of virtuous inquisitiveness, and a courageous attitude toward improving one’s knowledge motivated by the love of truth (King, 2021; Roberts and Wood, 2007).

Which virtues are necessary for good thinking?

One possible claim, following King (2021), is that a good thinker would possess some combination of multiple virtues, which may include the following:

Of course, one need not have a virtue to the full extent to possess it, as virtues come in degrees (Jayawickreme and Fleeson, 2017; King, 2021 see also Jayawickreme et al., 2014 in Theory and Research in Education). In addition, it remains unclear to what extent the virtues are linked together. It is possible that these virtues are fully unified; or that they come in clusters; or that some virtues are largely separable from each other. It is also possible that some virtues may be more fundamental to intellectual character than others, such that some virtues must be at a high level for a person to qualify as having intellectual character, whereas other virtues only need to be at a medium level or higher to quality a person as having good intellectual character.

How do these virtues work together?

Conceptually, there are several ways in which intellectual virtues may be interrelated. For example, it is possible that these virtues each serve distinct functions and correspond to theoretically distinct spheres of activity. That is, the virtues complement each other by kicking in when a relevant task or situation is present but remaining dormant otherwise. Several virtues enhance overall good thinking, but they do so under different conditions. For example, curiosity could motivate general exploration of the environment. Open-mindedness could serve the functions of allowing the individual to update models of the world when conditions or information changes, rather than stick to familiar but misleading beliefs (Baehr, 2011). Intellectual humility may help enhancing social and non-social knowledge acquisition and improving belief accuracy against a range of cognitive limitations (e.g. self-serving biases). A thinker deficient in one of the virtues might think well in other circumstances, but fail when the missing virtue’s function is required. This means, for example, that in a specific situation, one may be intellectually humble without needing to be open-minded or intellectually courageous. When circumstances change such that intellectual courage is needed, this thinker would do worse.

Another possibility is that intellectual virtues exist within a hierarchical taxonomy with a prerequisite structure. Lower-level virtues are prerequisites to obtaining the corresponding higher-level virtues. For example, one cannot be intellectually humble without being both curious and open-minded. It is not until a person both seeks out new information (curiosity) and gives fair and honest hearing to alternative standpoints (open-mindedness) that they have the capacity and/or need to acknowledge their cognitive limitations and potentially revise their opinion (intellectual humility).

Alternatively, intellectual virtues may mutually reinforce each other in producing good thinking and knowing. As Spiegel (2012) suggested, intellectual humility may have a ‘trickle-down’ impact on open-mindedness as the believer applies the insight from intellectual humility to specific beliefs, leading her to be open-minded (p. 35). Such a view would arguably be more consistent with thinking about an intellectually virtuous thinker rather than focusing on the benefits of a single virtue.

Spiegel’s (2012) insights about how virtues mutually reinforce each other raise the important question of clarifying how different intellectual virtues work smoothly together to achieve the outcomes of possessing good intellectual character, that is, attain truth, understanding, or other epistemic goods. Furthermore, because the above possibilities are not mutually exclusive, a combination of some of them may be in play. The different possibilities above have differing implications for the operation, definition, and inculcation of intellectual virtues.