Epistemic Humility

CORE DEFINITION

A disposition in epistemology and decision science that treats one's own beliefs as provisional, acknowledging that the evidence may be incomplete and that others may perceive what one cannot. The core proposition is that confidence is calibrated rather than suppressed: the point is to attach appropriate uncertainty to claims, which reduces defensive reasoning and increases the rate at which errors are corrected. The key qualification is that humility is not the absence of a position; refusing to commit to any judgment is a failure of the same virtue, since decisions still have to be made on incomplete evidence.