Too little
Borrowed certainty
“We need a cause by six, so use the likely one.”
The deadline supplies confidence that the evidence has not earned.
Humility
State what remains unknown instead of borrowing certainty from your deadline.
Openness to recognizing the limits of one’s knowledge and importance.
Humility recognizes the limits of one’s knowledge and importance. For a journalist, that means describing a useful finding without claiming the final word. You can state what the records establish firmly while acknowledging the question they do not answer. The reader receives both the contribution and its edge.
Humility gives an honest edge to what readers know
The deadline alarm rings beside a draft that establishes what happened but not why. Your cursor sits in the space where a confident explanation would be convenient. The clock contributes another ring and no evidence. You finish the verified account, name the unanswered question, and leave the cause unresolved. The clock may be punctual; it is a poor source.
Finding the balance in Humility
Publication time arrives while a central cause remains unknown, although several relevant facts are verified.
A fitting response
Bounded confidence
“Here is what is established; the cause remains unconfirmed.”
Readers can use the verified information without mistaking inference for fact.
Pursued too far
Self-erasing doubt
“I cannot know everything, so I have nothing useful to say.”
A real contribution is withheld because it is incomplete.
If the open question makes the proposed account misleading or useless, delaying may be appropriate. Humility includes that judgment; it is not a formula requiring either publication or silence.
What Humility makes possible
Readers know which parts of the account they can rely on and what may change. A clear limit can also invite a useful follow-up from someone with relevant information, without pretending every suggestion deserves equal confidence.
Humility in ordinary life
The trip update
Tell a friend that the train is delayed and the new departure time is unknown, rather than inventing an estimate.
The meeting explanation
State the part you observed and distinguish it from what you heard second-hand.
Nearby virtues, different work
Exactitude
Exactitude faithfully represents the details and limits; Humility makes recognizing your own limit possible.
Courage
Courage may help you admit uncertainty when others expect certainty. Humility concerns the acknowledgment itself.
Humility and its counterfeits
Ritual hedging
Ritual hedging counterfeits Humility by adding “perhaps” everywhere while leaving the actual gap unnamed. Genuine humility makes uncertainty specific.
Borrowed authority
Deferring to a confident person merely to avoid owning a judgment is borrowed authority, a counterfeit of Humility. A modest account still weighs reasons.
How to cultivate Humility
Separate a verified finding from the explanation you hope it supports.
Name one open question in language a reader can understand.
Update the account when the gap is resolved, without rewriting the earlier uncertainty as certainty all along.
Try it today
In an ordinary update, state one useful thing you know and, if material, one thing you do not. Avoid adding either false certainty or unnecessary apologies.
Questions worth returning to
- What is the exact boundary of my knowledge here?
- Am I understating useful evidence to protect myself from ever being wrong?
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
Because he cannot establish true conclusions by imperfect means, he is not to desist from doing anything at all.
Harriet Martineau · How to Observe: Morals and Manners · Part I, Introduction
The surrounding argument allows observers to contribute useful particulars without claiming a final judgment on a people. It supports stating a bounded finding instead of choosing between omniscience and silence.
Where there is any doubt or vagueness in my recollection, or where there is hearsay testimony, I state the fact explicitly;
Upton Sinclair · The Brass Check · Introductory
Sinclair promises to identify uncertain recollection and hearsay while making unusually sweeping claims for his book elsewhere in the paragraph. The useful principle is the specific disclosure of limits, not an endorsement of his claim to total accuracy.
Lastly, I have had ample leisure from not having to earn my own bread.
Charles Darwin · The Autobiography of Charles Darwin · Written May 1st, 1881
His account of method credits a material advantage as well as personal effort. Reporting gains credibility when it names the conditions that made its access possible.
Similarly, if I say, "Either love me or hate me," "Either call my theory true or call it false," your option is avoidable. You may remain indifferent to me, neither loving nor hating, and you may decline to offer any judgment as to my theory.
James distinguishes a forced choice from one that permits withholding judgment. The preceding alternatives make his example intelligible: a deadline can require an account without requiring an unsupported verdict about the cause.
It is easy to do this; and it may make an eternal difference to the observer's love of truth, and attainment of it, whether he preserves his philosophic thoughts in the form of dogmas or of queries.
Harriet Martineau · How to Observe: Morals and Manners · Part III, Mechanical Methods
The preceding advice is to record provisional inferences as conjectures. Writing an unresolved cause as a question keeps it open to evidence instead of hardening it into a fact.
If there were any such at that time,—and there may have been a few,—their land was probably held in the name of some white patron,—a method not uncommon during slavery.
W. E. B. Du Bois · The Souls of Black Folk · Chapter VIII, Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece
The preceding sentence says the 1870 tax books report no Black landholders. Du Bois marks a possible explanation without turning it into a finding; absence from the record does not justify omniscience.
Leaving the Rubicon incident away back where it belongs, I can say with truth that the reason I am in the literary profession is because I had the measles when I was twelve years old.
Mark Twain · What Is Man? and Other Essays · The Turning-Point of My Life, section II
Twain humorously traces the contingencies behind his career instead of claiming a single self-made turning point. The joke keeps a confident account of one's success from becoming an overconfident account of its cause.
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Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.