On Intellectual Humility
What do you know that you don't know?
I remember sitting in a meeting years ago, surrounded by people far more experienced than I was. A question came my way, one I thought I should have an answer to. My instinct was to reach for something, anything, that sounded informed. Instead, I heard myself say, “I don’t know.” There was a pause. Strangely, I felt lighter. What I expected to be a moment of inadequacy became a moment of clarity, an opening. The conversation that followed was richer, more collaborative, we brainstormed, everyone with an opportunity to contribute. I realised that “I don’t know” wasn’t the end of knowledge but its beginning.
It’s strange how liberating it can be to recognise the limits of one’s own understanding, especially in a world that constantly rewards certainty.
The phrase “I don’t know” has accompanied me in unexpected places: in conversations that could have hardened into debate, in work that demanded answers before I was ready, even in moments of solitude where I found myself thinking through questions that refused resolution.
It’s taken time for me to realise that it “I don’t know” isn’t ignorance but rather awareness; the difference between not knowing and knowing that you don’t know.
Psychologists define intellectual humility as the realistic appraisal of the limits of one’s knowledge, coupled with openness to new evidence and perspectives (Leary et al., 2017; Porter & Schumann, 2018). This is an important point because intellectual humility is not the same as chronic self-doubt or weak conviction, it’s not lacking confidence in what you know, it’s accurately calibrating that confidence to the evidence.
This distinction has empirical support. Research on metacognitive calibration shows that knowing what you don’t know is a distinct cognitive skill, separate from general intelligence or domain expertise (Dunning, 2011). Those who score high on intellectual humility demonstrate what David Dunning calls “second-order metacognitive ability”: they can accurately assess the boundaries of their own knowledge, which paradoxically makes them more effective learners and decision-makers.
Consider the Dunning-Kruger effect: those with the least expertise often express the most certainty. Intellectual humility inverts this pattern. Arguably, it creates strong convictions held lightly enough to allow for correction.
Studies across disciplines converge on this understanding: intellectual humility is both a cognitive stance and a moral virtue. It tempers the ego’s attachment to being right, making space for learning and dialogue.
In empirical terms, people who score higher on measures of intellectual humility are less prone to confirmation bias, more willing to engage with opposing views and are better able to distinguish between what they believe and what they know (Krumrei-Mancuso & Rouse, 2016; Deffler et al., 2016).
The philosopher Ian Church (2016) describes it as “a virtue of knowing one’s epistemic place.” It’s not a negation of knowledge but rather a posture toward it, a refusal to let certainty close down curiosity.
The philosophical roots of intellectual humility run deep.
Socrates may have given us the foundational articulation: “I know that I know nothing.” This wasn’t false modesty but a methodological commitment, the recognition that wisdom begins with the acknowledgment of ignorance. The Socratic method itself is an exercise in intellectual humility: it proceeds by questioning rather than assertion, by exposing the limits of knowledge rather than defending its certainty.
The Pyrrhonian skeptics took this further, developing epoché, the suspension of judgment or the withholding of assent to any belief. Where dogmatists claimed knowledge and academics claimed certain ignorance, the Pyrrhonians advocated living with unresolved questions, finding tranquility not in answers but in the cessation of the demand for them (Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism).
Aristotle located intellectual virtue within sophrosyne, a balanced sense of proportion that guards against intellectual hubris. The Stoics saw humility as an act of alignment with reality, an acknowledgment that human reason, while divine in spark, remains partial and prone to distortion (Epictetus, Discourses).
In the modern period, Immanuel Kant (1784) called enlightenment “the emergence from self-imposed immaturity” ; he also warned that reason’s ambition must be tempered by humility before the limits of knowledge. To him, humility was discipline: the recognition that the human mind cannot grasp the thing-in-itself, that some realities will always exceed conceptual reach (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781).
And for 20th-century phenomenologists like Edith Stein (On the Problem of Empathy, 1917) and Gabriel Marcel (Being and Having, 1935), humility was understood as relational: the awareness that truth is not possessed but encountered, something that arises between self, world and others, rather than within solitary certainty.
This is perhaps where humility and spirituality converge: both ask us to live with mystery, not in spite of it.
Let’s look at modern cognitive science to understand why intellectual humility works.
The key lies in what Mark Leary and colleagues (2017) call “hypo-egoic processing”, a reduction in ego-defensive cognition (this is a very distilled way of explaining it, I invite you to read more on it as it’s a rich subject).
When we’re intellectually humble, we’re less likely to process information through the filter of self-protection. This has measurable effects: humble thinkers generate higher-quality arguments, engage in more complex reasoning and show greater tolerance for ambiguity (Porter & Schumann, 2018).
Studies in metacognition, the awareness of one’s own thought processes, show that people who can accurately assess what they don’t know tend to learn more effectively and make better decisions (Fleming & Lau, 2014). We could say this is about epistemic efficiency; when you know the boundaries of your knowledge, you know where to direct your attention and effort.
Intellectual humility also functions as what we might call an epistemic immune system. Research by Bowes and colleagues (2020) found that those scoring higher in intellectual humility are less susceptible to conspiracy beliefs and misinformation, though the researchers note this relationship is correlational and the causal mechanisms remain under investigation. The working hypothesis is that intellectual humility creates cognitive space between belief and identity, making it easier to revise beliefs when evidence demands it.
The paradox is that admitting uncertainty can make us cognitively stronger. To know that we don’t fully know, and to remain open to correction, is to move closer to truth.
The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1868) developed what he called fallibilism, the doctrine that all our knowledge claims are potentially revisable, that no belief is immune to correction. It could be interpreted as skepticism about the possibility of knowledge, however I would venture to look at it as a framework for how knowledge works.
Peirce argued that enquiry is a self-correcting process. We form hypotheses, test them against reality and revise them when they fail. Truth, in this view, is the opinion that enquiry would eventually settle on “if carried sufficiently far” (How to Make Our Ideas Clear, 1878). Intellectual humility is the virtue that keeps this process alive, the refusal to declare enquiry closed. If we look at it from this standpoint, we can hold strong beliefs, act on them with conviction, and still recognise that they remain, in principle, revisable.
Here’s the tension many people feel: Can I hold strong beliefs (moral, political, existential, etc.) while remaining intellectually humble?
Yes, and it requires a shift in how we understand conviction.
Intellectual humility doesn’t demand that we treat all views as equally valid or suspend judgment on matters of importance. Rather, it asks that we hold even our deepest convictions with a kind of provisional certainty, firm enough to act upon, flexible enough to revise if evidence demands it.
Recent research by Tenelle Porter and colleagues (2020) shows that intellectual humility doesn’t weaken conviction; it refines it. Intellectually humble people are just as likely to hold strong beliefs but they arrive at those beliefs through more rigorous reasoning and remain more responsive to counter-evidence. Virtue epistemologists look at it as the calibration of belief-strength to evidential support. You can be confident that climate change is real, that democracy matters, that cruelty is wrong and still remain open to refining your understanding of why these things are true, how they manifest and what follows from them.
The alternative to humility is closure.
Certainty feels safe but it freezes the mind in place. Humility, by contrast, keeps it in motion. It allows for the possibility that our current frameworks are incomplete, that every conclusion is provisional, that understanding is something we move toward.
In many contemplative traditions, humility is the opposite of control. It invites us to hold knowledge lightly, to let it guide rather than dominate our perception.
Mystical writers from Meister Eckhart (Sermons, 14th century) to Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace, 1947) saw humility as the condition for seeing reality as it is, unfiltered by egoic projection. Weil called attention “the rarest and purest form of generosity”, a kind of spiritual humility in which we suspend the impulse to impose meaning long enough for the world to disclose itself.
This resonates with intellectual humility: both require presence without possession, the willingness to receive what one cannot master.
It is, in a sense, a discipline of wonder; not the naive wonder of ignorance but the mature astonishment that knowledge itself remains partial, contingent, alive.
In conversations, especially difficult ones, humility is often the first casualty.
We listen less to understand and more to reply. We defend our positions, yet research shows that intellectual humility enhances empathy and perspective-taking (Leary et al., 2017). It slows the reflex to judge and fosters curiosity about how others get to their beliefs. The mechanism appears to be hypo-egoic processing again: when we’re less defensive about our own views, we’re more genuinely curious about others’.
In this sense, humility is not merely personal but relational. It allows for the kind of dialogue where truth can emerge between, not be won by.
In my own life, I’ve noticed that when I start a conversation with the assumption that I might be missing something, that there’s more to see than what I currently see, something shifts. The exchange feels less like debate, more like shared exploration.
That’s what humility gives us: a way to dance with uncertainty, without fear.
In our current epistemic climate, fractured by echo chambers, algorithmic amplification and tribal epistemology, intellectual humility doesn’t only relate to personal virtue, it becomes a civic necessity.
Psychologist Dan Kahan’s research on cultural cognition shows that people evaluate evidence through the lens of group identity (Kahan et al., 2012). We’re less likely to update our beliefs when doing so would alienate us from our community. Intellectual humility disrupts this pattern. It creates space between identity and idea, allowing us to ask: What if my group is wrong about this?
We can recognise that democracy requires more than free speech, it requires epistemically virtuous citizens, people capable of distinguishing between what they wish were true and what the evidence supports.
Institutions matter here too. How might we design educational systems, media ecosystems and deliberative forums that reward intellectual humility rather than punish it? How do we create cultures where “I was wrong” is met with respect rather than mockery?
These are philosophical questions and also structural ones, requiring changes in how we incentivise thinking.
If you’re convinced that intellectual humility matters, how do you actually develop it?
Seek out strong counterarguments. Read the best opposing views. Follow the principle of “steel-manning”: articulate the other side’s position so well that its proponents would agree with your summary.
Practice Socratic questioning. When you hold a belief, ask yourself: What would it take to change my mind? What evidence am I relying on? What assumptions am I making? This way, you understand the foundation of your on beliefs, you don’t undermine them.
Engage with people who think differently. Not to debate - to understand. Ask genuine questions. Resist the urge to immediately refute. Let yourself sit in the discomfort of not knowing who’s right.
Embrace “strong opinions, weakly held.” This phrase, coined by futurist Paul Saffo, captures the balance: form clear positions based on available evidence but be ready to abandon them when better evidence arrives.
You might think “this will make me wishy-washy”, however these practices build intellectual resiliency, the ability to hold complexity, revise beliefs and maintain integrity through change.
Maybe that’s why I don’t know doesn’t feel like a failure to me. It feels like the beginning of thinking. Knowledge, if it is to remain alive, must make room for the unknown.
Intellectual humility is a refusal to let conviction ossify into dogma. It’s the recognition that truth is larger than any single perspective, that understanding deepens through dialogue, that the mind’s highest achievement is not mastery but ongoing receptivity.
In a world that mistakes certainty for strength, humility is the more courageous path. It requires us to stand in the tension between knowing and not knowing, to speak with confidence while remaining open to correction, to be decisive without being closed.
This is what it means to think well: not to arrive at final answers, but to remain faithfully engaged with questions that matter.
The Pyrrhonians sought ataraxia, (imperturbability, tranquility) through the suspension of judgment. Perhaps we can find something similar: the deeper peace of being able to live at peace with what we don’t yet understand.
That’s the gift of intellectual humility. It transforms “I don’t know “ from an admission of failure into an opening, a space of possibility.
Our Weekly Reflection Question
I would like to leave you with this question; I hope it ignites a playful reflection.
Thank you for being part of Worth Asking. Here’s to the questions that move us forward.
With love,
Vjera Orbanic,
Worth Asking