The word “epistemic” essentially means anything dealing with knowledge.
Epistemic humility, then, is being humble with your assumptions about understanding. It’s recognizing that you may not know something—may not know a great many things—and that this is natural and okay.
This doesn’t mean deciding you’re ignorant and therefore know nothing about anything. And it doesn’t mean proudly declaring that you’re ignorant so as to seem wise or rebellious.
It means recognizing that your understanding of the world is incomplete, and that as a consequence you may not perceive things as clearly as you believe you do.
It means there’s unlimited growth potential in your future, and you can understand absolutely anything with time and effort and access to the right resources and stimuli. But it also means there will always be a chance you’re missing a vital puzzle piece: something you may acquire later in life, but which you may never acquire.
This concept reminds me that it’s okay not to know, and that it’s possible to admit my ignorance to myself and to others, and to not feel diminished as a consequence of that admission. Acknowledging my ignorance is a step toward learning more, because I’m unlikely to pursue what I’d like to know if I believe I already know it.
It also forces me to be less certain, less than 100% confident of my proclamations and positions.
It may be that I can understand the general shape of things from where I stand, today. But it may also be that if I were to step just a foot to the left, crane my neck a little, wait an hour, or travel a mile in any direction, what I’m looking at would appear quite different from how it does here and now.
My current perspective flattens three-dimensional objects and I’ll always be missing something if I choose to look at the world from just that one standpoint.
This also means that someone else’s perception of the same thing—which they are viewing from a little to my left, or from three miles behind me, or from orbit around the planet upon which I stand—may be entirely different from mine. And their distinct perception will make just as much sense to them, from their perspective, as mine does from where I stand.
Who we are today is partially shaped by our understanding of the world. That understanding, in turn, is shaped by our knowledge of fundamental rules and logic, and our internal library of data points and anecdotal memories.
The more we learn, the more we come to recognize that previous assessments about ourselves and the world were wrong—or at the very least incomplete.
The simple models of atoms we’re taught in our Introduction to Physics classes are vaguely correct, but not reality. The understanding we have of ourselves, of our hopes and dreams and priorities, also start out simple—primarily revolving around basic needs and wants—but eventually become more complex. That’s partly because we grow as people along the way, but it’s also because we slowly come to know ourselves better.
Growth, then, is predicated not just on expanding our intellectual horizons, but coming to realize how limited our previous horizons were.
We can tap that recognition to help us make reasoned guesses about what we don’t yet understand. We can be humble about what we know, and take our own ignorance into consideration as we strive to learn more about the world and ourselves.
It’s possible for our initial impressions of the world to be fairly accurate, of course, whether by chance or strength of reasoning. But for most of us, and for most facets of our lives, there will always be more growth to achieve: another perspective from which to look at things, another data point to add to our mental graphs, another eureka moment to enjoy.
That’s comforting to me.
It means we needn’t worry that the next intellectual hill we crest will be the last.
We can pursue greater understanding enthusiastically and we’ll never (in the span of a human lifetime, at least) run out of hills to climb.