Science, Humility, and the Galileo Affair

chapter 12 Science, Humility, and the Galileo Affair

Craig A. Boyd

Introduction

In his landmark work, After Virtue,1 Alasdair MacIntyre argues that the virtues must be socially located since practical rationality requires the communica- tion of habits of excellence from the expert to the novice. He elaborates on this idea of the transmission of virtues in a later volume, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Humans Need the Virtues, with the introduction of “virtues of acknowledged dependence” where he argues that in a community of any kind we must come to the realization that our achievements are never truly our own but depend on the gracious activity of others.2 These others instruct, guide, and develop us in ways we could not achieve by our individual efforts alone. Participation in a community means not only that at some point all of us are learners but also that we can become teachers and mentors as well. This is a truth that applies to those virtues that sustain communities of all sorts. The idea of a virtue, of course, is wider in scope than the traditional moral virtues such as prudence, justice, courage, and temperance. In addition to the moral virtues, Aristotle held there were also intellectual virtues such as wisdom, understanding, and science which “perfected” the mind, or the intellect. In the centuries since Aristotle, the moral virtues and the epistemic virtues parted company until only recently when such “virtue epistemologists” as Ernst Sosa, John Greco, and Linda Zagzebski began to reconsider the connec- tion between the intellectual and the moral virtues. According to DePaul and Zagzebski,

Virtue epistemologists understandably concentrate on the ways the idea of virtue can help resolve epistemological questions and leave the conceptual work of explaining value to ethics. Clearly, then, virtue epistemology needs virtue ethics. But … virtue ethics also has something important to learn from virtue epistemology. Perhaps due to historical accident, virtue ethicists have had little to say about intellectual virtue.

1 MacIntyre 1981. 2 MacIntyre 1999.

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They generally take for granted that the moral and intellectual virtues are not only distinct, but relatively independent.3

But work by virtue epistemologists has reinvigorated the discussion concern- ing the relationship between an individual’s character (at least in some mini- mal sense) and her ability to perceive adequately.4 And although some virtue epistemologists do not make an explicit appeal to Aristotle or Aquinas, the work of these two influential philosophers remains significant for contempo- rary discussions on the virtues. One of the traditional Aristotelian intellectual virtues is science, and it func- tions in a similar way to ethics since both have truth as their telos5 and require specific habits of the mind without which the practitioner cannot achieve her goal. Science so construed, therefore, represents an arena in which the ac- quisition of the intellectual virtues can and should play a critical role.6 Chief among these is the virtue of humility. Unless those practicing science develop the virtue of humility they will fail to consider plausible options and alterna- tives to their own views and may simply remain intellectually incorrigible. But how might humility—and its related virtues—help us down this path? I think a reconsideration of the work of Thomas Aquinas provides fruitful resources for this; and so in this chapter, I begin by considering the role of right reason in Aquinas’s thought and how it shapes his account of the virtues of science, prudence, and humility. I then appeal to MacIntyre’s idea of “virtues of acknowledged dependence” as a way of illuminating how humility depends on the work of others. I conclude with a discussion of Galileo and how his own work could have benefitted from the development of intellectual humility.

Aquinas on Right Reason and the Virtues

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle considers 5 intellectual virtues: wisdom, understanding, science, prudence, and art.7 The first three are virtues of the

3 DePaul and Zagzebski 2003, 2. 4 See for example, Zagzebski 1996; Roberts and Wood 2007. 5 For Aquinas, science is concerned with truth as known while prudence is concerned with truth as an operation in the sense of “doing the truth” by pursuing goodness. 6 In this chapter I am only interested in a wider understanding of science as an empirical inquiry into nature and am merely using Aquinas to illustrate the importance of humility to any kind of investigation whatsoever. I obviously do not intend a return to medieval “science.” 7 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book vi, 1141a19–1141b25.