Intellectual humility has recently been hailed as the key to thinking well. The story of Barbara McClintock proves otherwise
Barbara McClintock at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York in 1963. Courtesy the Barbara McClintock Papers, American Philosophical Society
Barbara McClintock at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York in 1963. Courtesy the Barbara McClintock Papers, American Philosophical Society
is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford, and a tutorial fellow of Exeter College. From January 2025, she’ll be associate professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Suppose you want to be a better person. (Lots of us do.) How might you go about it? You might try to become more generous and commit to donating more of your income to charity. Or you might try to become more patient, and practise listening to your partner, instead of snapping at them. These commonsense prescriptions invoke an ancient ethical tradition. Generosity and patience are virtues – excellences of character, whose exercise makes us flourish. To live well, says the virtue ethicist, is to cultivate and exercise just such excellences of character.
Part of living well, though, is thinking well. Our souls have an intellectual, as well as a practical, part; we cannot live fully flourishing lives unless we flourish intellectually. Are there, then, specifically intellectual virtues – excellences of intellectual character, whose exercise makes us good thinkers? Aristotle – whose works remain a touchstone for contemporary virtue theorists – certainly thought so. The intellectual part of the soul, he wrote in his Nicomachean Ethics, strives to attain truth; accordingly, he thought, the intellectual virtues are just those dispositions that qualify it to perform this function. Where the virtue ethicist bids us to be generous and patient, temperate and brave, the virtue epistemologist bids us to be thoughtful and fair, to be diligent and open-minded. At their most ambitious, the virtue epistemologist argues not just that such traits are valuable for their own sake, or that the exercise of such virtues will (tend to) yield knowledge, but, further, that our grasp of what knowledge is, in the first place, parasitic on our understanding of such virtues. If I know that – say – DNA has a double helix shape, that’s because I believe what an intellectually virtuous agent would believe about DNA, under circumstances similar to mine.
