A single trait won’t make you a good thinker
However, was I right in recommending just a singgel trait? Is intellectual humility by itself enough to promote good thinking? When you zoom out to consider what is really involved in being a good thinker, it becomes clear that simply acknowledging that one could be wrong is not enough.
To provide an example, perhaps someone is willing to acknowledge that they could be wrong because "whatever, man." They didn't have particularly strong convictions to begin with. In other words, it's not enough to say you're mistaken about your beliefs. You also need to peduli about having the right beliefs.
While part of being a good thinker involves recognizing one's possible ignorance, it also requires an eagerness to learn, curiosity about the world, and a commitment to getting it right.
What other traits, then, should people strive to cultivate? The philosopher Nate King writes that being a good thinker involves possessing multiple traits, including intellectual humility, but also intellectual firmness, love of knowledge, curiosity, carefulness and open-mindedness.
A single trait won’t make you a good thinker
Being a good thinker involves confronting multiple challenges beyond being humble about what you know. You also need to:
Be sufficiently motivated to figur out what's true.
Konsentrasi on the pertinent information and carefully seek it out.
Be open-minded when considering information that you may disagree with.
Confront information or questions that are novel or different from what you're generally used to engaging with.
Be willing to put in the usaha to figur it all out.
This is a lot, but philosopher Jason Baehr writes that possessing good intellectual character requires successfully addressing all these challenges.
So, I was wrong to say that intellectual humility was the silver bullet that can teach students how to think well. Indeed, being intellectually humble - in a way that promotes good thinking - likely involves being both curious and open-minded about new information.
Focusing on a singgel characteristic such as intellectual humility rather than the totality of intellectual character ends up promoting lopsided character development, similar to that of a bodibuilder focusing their usahas on one bicep rather than their whole bodi.
My lab's current work is now attempting to address this issue by defining the good thinker in terms of multiple intellectual traits. This approach is similar to work in personality science that has identified key traits of people who are psychologically healthy as well as those whose patterns of thinking, perasaan and behaving cause enduring distress or problems. We hope to further understand how good thinkers function in daily life - for example, their personality, the quality of their relationships and their well-being - as well as how their intellectual character influences their thinking, behavior and sense of identity.
I think this work is penting in order to understand the key characteristics of good thinking and to learn more about how to build these habits in ourselves and others.
