Philosophy 101, #10: What is an Epistemologically Modest Person?

The epistemologically modest person is someone who is aware that he knows just how little he knows. It was well expressed by Socrates when he said:

“All I know is that I know nothing”.

I believe that this attitude is extremely important to hold as an inquisitive human being.

Karl Popper

An epistemologically modest person starts with his own awareness of his ignorance from where he grows his wisdom. Karl Popper has applied the position of the epistemologically modes person to the area of politics, and maintains that this type of person would less likely act as a ‘social engineer’ and would therefore less likely cause unintended consequences. The social engineer should be careful that his next policies to end the unintended consequences, which were created by his previous policies in the first place, would create more unintended consequences. It could be the beginning of an ugly downward spiraling out-of-control policy-making disaster.

Karl Popper takes this position extremely serious, and believes that much of our intellectual world is being ruled by intellectual immodesty - by intellectuals who use grandiose words that sound very intelligent and whose theories are extremely opaque, but downright wrong. He writes:

I have decided to preach intellectual modesty for the rest of my days. There is a tradition, an enormously strong tradition of intellectual immodesty and irresponsibility. Around the year 1930 I told a joke. I said that many students don't go to university assuming that it is a great empire of knowledge, in the hope to gain some understanding; but that they go to university to learn how to speak in an impressive and incomprehensible way. This is the tradition of intellectualism. At the time I thought it was a joke. But having become a university professor myself, I have perceived with horror that it is a reality. That's the way things are, unfortunately. In universities there is a tradition that legitimizes this attitude, it is the tradition of hegelianism. Especially in Germany, Hegel is extraordinarily admired. People really believe that Hegel was a great philosopher because he used big words. And it is exactly this incredible immodesty that destroys so much in and between intellectuals. I would like to spend my last years fighting against this. I want to start a new fashion. I have always fought against fashions, and I have never followed any fashion, and I have never tried to start one. But I would love to start a new fashion of intellectual modesty, of permanent thought of everything we don't know.

Reference

Karl Popper & Konrad Lorenz (1999). Die Zukunft ist Offen.

---

If you enjoy reading this article, please consider following me. I mainly write about philosophy, economics, and my travels.

Follow me @chhaylin

E-mail: [email protected]

Wordpress: www.chhaylinlim.wordpress.com