Funded by John Templeton Foundation
Principal Investigators: Nancy Cartwright and Robin Hendry
Scientific endeavors fail or succeed for many reasons. We hypothesize that Intellectual Humility (IH), or its lack, plays a significant role, not just as a virtue of individual scientists but as embodied in the norms, practices and institutions that constitute science. We will look at successes and failures in science through the lens of IH in order to chart what constitutes IH in scientific institutions and how IH affects scientific success.
This project has four aims: 1) opening up research on IH in science, where little attention is directed; 2) focusing on IH in the institutions that affect how science is conducted and what it achieves; 3) studying how IH impacts effectiveness and progress in science and its ability to serve society; 4) exploring how to make science more successful and better able to serve society.
To achieve our aims we will look at successes and failures in different domains of pure and applied science: physics, chemistry, and the socio-economic sciences. We will proceed iteratively, formulating concepts and theory from case studies and feeding those back to inform the studies.