https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0386-2039
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ABSTRACT
I offer an overview of Alessandra Tanesini’s discussion of how best to educate for intellectual virtue in the final chapter of her book The Mismeasure of the Self. I identify the unifying theme behind most of her objections to existing approaches, namely that they fail to instil the proper motivations for intellectual virtue, and I raise an issue about whether Tanesini’s preferred approach, self-affirmation, avoids this worry. I argue that it is not clear that it does; in particular, it’s left unclear how self-affirmative interventions are meant to encourage a person’s evaluations of their own intellectual achievements and capacities to be motivated by accuracy or knowledge, as Tanesini requires them to be if they are to be intellectually virtuous rather than vicious.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The paper Tanesini discussed on that occasion was published as (Tanesini, Citation2016a), though these remarks don’t feature in the published version.
2 Following Tanesini (Citation2021, 1n1) and much of the other literature on epistemic virtues and vices, I use ‘epistemic’ and ‘intellectual’ interchangeably here.
3 For a broader overview and discussion of Tanesini’s book, and the issues it raises, see McGlynn (Citationforthcoming). The present paper develops in detail a point made only in passing there.
4 I don’t attempt to do full justice to Tanesini’s discussion of each of these proposals; what follows is a sketch of what I take to be her main points for my discussion later in this paper.
5 Cassam (Citation2019) calls epistemic vices that interfere with their own detection ‘stealthy’ and intellectual vices that interfere in any attempts to rid the possessor of them ‘resistant’; see McGlynn Citation2019 for discussion of such vices and how they relate to socially-situated ignorance and traditional sceptical challenges.
6 I find this last point unconvincing, for two related reasons. First, Tanesini likens feeling pleased that one is making progress towards humility to ‘humble-bragging’, but it’s not clear to me in what sense there is anything like bragging involved. Feeling pleased that one has done well on a test or has been given a hard-earned raise at work isn’t the same as bragging about one’s performance or one’s improved salary, and it’s not clear to me why being pleased about progress towards humility would be any different. Second, elsewhere in Tanesini’s book she argues against the suggestion that modesty (one aspect of humility) requires ignorance of one’s ‘intellectual strengths and successes’ and she explicitly allows that one can take pride in and feel pleased about these strengths and successes without thereby lacking humility (Citation2021, 75–77). It’s unclear to me why feeling pleased that one is making progress towards intellectual humility couldn’t sometimes be the same: a case of correctly getting the measure of oneself with the right kinds of motivations.
7 Croce (Citation2019) recommends employing such ‘realistic exemplars’ in the context of educating for moral virtues.
8 These are attitudes towards objects, of any kind; they are not propositional attitudes in the sense philosophers are familiar with, though they can take propositions as objects if propositions are objects (just as they can be directed at bananas, or the city of San Francisco, or anything else). See Tanesini Citation2021, 49–51.
9 Tanesini notes that the notion of strength, as it applies to attitudes, isn’t a univocal notion, but she picks out accessibility in this sense as her main focus (Citation2021, 58–59).
10 I’m here identifying two ideas in Tanesini’s book; the idea that intellectual humility involves value-expressive motivations from chapter 4 and the idea that humility involves evaluations of oneself in light of values which one reflectively endorses. Tanesini doesn’t explicitly identify these, as far as I can tell, but the identification is natural, and in any case, I don’t think the point to be made in the text turns on it. The idea that educational interventions might work by affecting the function played by the target’s attitudes is perhaps more explicit in Tanesini’s earlier paper on this topic (Citation2016b, 525) than in her book.
11 Tanesini’s earlier paper, which the final chapter of her 2021 book develops, concludes by suggesting that self-affirmation techniques are a ‘prerequisite’ for educating for intellectual virtue, allowing other approaches such as explicit education and exemplarism to ‘become effective in bringing about attitude change’ (Citation2016b, 526–527). This way of thinking about self-affirmation and its relationship to the other educational strategies Tanesini discusses seems to have been mostly dropped by her book, and in particular she now seems to see almost no role for explicit education. My thanks to Alessandra Tanesini and the other participants of an author-meets-critics session on this book, organised and hosted online by the CONCEPT centre at the University of Cologne in January 2022.