For the latest on my Chair’s page, I got a chance to chat with my pioneering colleague, Duncan Prichard.
– Aaron James
Aaron James: Hey Duncan, so cool the intellectual virtues are getting attention — how are you feeling about your brainchild catching on? It’s not just your Anteater Virtues initiative with central admin here at UCI, but other colleges and universities taking note. You must be excited.
Duncan Pritchard: Yes, it’s great we’re now in the public-facing phase of the project. The full set of modules is publicly available and to see them being used in colleges, schools, and even in prison education is wonderful.
AJ: Oh, since we are after all philosophers, I should ask you how you define each of the four Anteater Virtues — curiosity, integrity, intellectual humility and intellectual tenacity. What is curiosity?
DP: The intellectual virtue of curiosity involves being driven by a desire for the truth to undertake feasible inquiries into important matters.
AJ: Great, what is integrity?
DP: The intellectual virtue of integrity involves being open and honest in one’s dealings with others and also being honest with oneself.
AJ: And intellectual humility?
DP: The virtue of intellectual humility involves being aware of one’s fallibility and hence being willing to learn from others and their expertise and experience.
AJ: And tenacity, meaning intellectually?
DP: The virtue of intellectual tenacity involves having the intellectual ‘grit’ to continue your inquiries even in the face of obstacles.
AJ: This sounds more fresh and holistic than the usual talk about critical thinking. How do you think about the difference?
DP: There’s a big debate in educational theory between those (like me) who think we should educate for virtuous intellectual character and those who argue that we should focus instead on critical thinking skills. Although the proposals overlap to some extent, there are important differences. In particular, while the intellectually virtuous person will have good critical thinking skills, the converse does not hold, as one could be a good critical thinker and yet not be intellectually virtuous.
AJ: Interesting – tell us more about the difference.
DP: To be intellectually virtuous is to be motivated by a deep valuing of the truth (and thus a disvaluing of inaccuracy and error). There’s nothing like this built into critical thinking. One could imagine a lawyer, say, who has outstanding critical thinking skills, but who doesn’t particularly care for the truth at all—all he cares about is winning his cases, impressing his colleagues, and so on. The intellectual virtues are admirable character traits—we esteem someone who is intellectually virtuous. So while we might be impressed by our lawyer's success in the courtroom, we may not admire his intellectual character at all (in fact, I think we would disapprove of it).
AJ: The virtues have a classical vibe — how do they connect with ancient thought in your own thinking?
DP: Yes, the most comprehensive account of the virtues — not only intellectual, but also moral and practical — was given by the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who lived in the 4th century BC. There are some differences between how we are using the intellectual virtues and his view, however, not least because he wouldn’t be happy with the idea of splitting the intellectual virtues off from the other virtues, especially the moral virtues.
AJ: And it’s not just the Greeks, right?
DP: Right, the general idea that we should esteem, and thus emulate, these intellectual character traits is not unique to Ancient Greece. As we discuss in some of the Anteater Virtues modules, very similar proposals are found in other ancient traditions, especially Confucianism and Classical Indian thought. It really is an idea that transcends any particular intellectual tradition.
AJ: Could you give us a glimpse of some ways intellectual virtue flows from your work in the contemporary theory of knowledge?
DP: The importance of the intellectual virtues arises from realizing that knowledge can often be a rather limited good. Knowledge can be acquired in an entirely passive way, as when one opens one’s eyes in the morning and comes to know things about one’s surroundings, or when one simply trusts the word of an expert. Don’t get me wrong, knowledge is a good thing to have!
AJ: Ha, yeah I worried for a second. Tell us more.
DP: My point is just that we seem to value active knowing over merely passive knowing. We admire scholars who are driven by a concern for the truth to actively seek answers to their questions, who do not take what they are told purely on trust but are willing to interrogate it to see if it holds water, who want to genuinely understand the world around them and not merely know a bunch of facts about it that someone told them. But that is just to say that what we really care about is being intellectual virtuous, as this is exactly the kinds of things that the intellectually virtuous person does.
AJ: And that connects to education.
DP: Yes, this is why the intellectual virtues are so important to education, as we want our students to be active knowers in just this sense. Put another way, education shouldn’t be just about instilling facts and skills, but should instead help students to think for themselves. That’s just what the intellectual virtues do.
AJ: You’re working with others on how teaching for intellectual virtue plays out in the classroom and already getting some interesting results. Can you give us a taste?
DP: Sure, what’s especially pleasing to see is that the positive educational effect is stable across the student population — e.g., it doesn’t vary in terms of factors like ethnicity, educational background, gender, and so on. That’s a really important result.
AJ: Has this been studied much before?
DP: There’s already a lot of empirical work suggesting that educating for virtuous intellectual character has positive effects on learning outcomes, but these studies tend to concern projects in schools. What’s distinctive about our project is that it’s the first time that educating for virtuous intellectual character has been embedded into the curriculum of an R1 university.
AJ: And you’re working with other researchers on this?
DP: We have some excellent social scientists at UCI who work specifically on measuring educational outcomes, not least Professor Richard Arum, who runs the UCI MUST project (Measuring Undergraduate Success Trajectories). I’ve been working with his team to determine the pedagogical effects on our students who have taken the modules, and we are getting lots of positive results, with several empirical papers now in print.
AJ: Are you hoping that new focus on intellectual virtue can help the larger culture correct what are, shall we say, certain misconceptions about what philosophy, humanities, and the larger university is trying to do?
DP: Yes, I think we really need to get a better understanding of what education is aiming at, particularly given the radical social changes that are coming in the new age of AI. If education is just about instilling knowledge and skills, then it won’t be clear why it’s needed if most of that expertise can be off-loaded to the AI.
AJ: Interesting, can you say more about what’s at stake?
DP: We need to get back to an important idea about university education that I think has been lost recently. When one thinks about the great educational theorists — people like John Dewey in America, John Henry Newman in Britain and Ireland, Wilhelm von Humboldt in Germany — what they share is the idea that university education cultivates a kind of freedom of mind.
AJ: So, freedom!
DP: Yup, as John Dewey famously put it: "Genuine freedom, in short, is intellectual". While university education obviously does give people knowledge and skills, its fundamental purpose aims higher than this: it is aiming to cultivate the intellectual characters of students so that they have the intellectual freedom to think and inquire for themselves.
AJ: Thanks, Duncan — this is all very exciting. Thanks for your time!
To learn more about the Anteater Virtues Project, and to enroll in the modules, click here!
Professor and Department Chair, Aaron James, works in ethics and political philosophy. Along with academic publication he writes books for a broad audience (e.g., Assholes, Surfing with Sartre, Money from Nothing).
Duncan Pritchard is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, with research mainly in the area of epistemology. He is the Director of the interdisciplinary Center for Knowledge, Technology & Society. He is also Director of the campuswide curriculum project, The Anteater Virtues.