=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1283/paper8
|storemode=property
|title=The Semantic Space of Intellectual Humility
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1283/paper_8.pdf
|volume=Vol-1283
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ecsi/ChristenAR14
}}
==The Semantic Space of Intellectual Humility==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1283/paper_8.pdf
The Semantic Space of Intellectual Humility
Markus Christen1 , Mark Alfano2 , and Brian Robinson3
1
University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
christen@ethik.uzh.ch
2
University of Oregon, Eugene OR, USA
mark.alfano@gmail.com
3
Michigan State University, East Lansing MI, USA
prof.brobinson@gmail.com
Abstract. Intellectual humility is an interesting but underexplored dis-
position. The claim “I am (intellectually) humble” seems paradoxical
in that someone who has the disposition in question would not typi-
cally volunteer it. There is an explanatory gap between the meaning of
the sentence and the meaning the speaker expresses by uttering it. We
therefore suggest analyzing intellectual humility semantically, using a
psycholexical approach that focuses on both synonyms and antonyms of
‘intellectual humility’. We present a thesaurus-based method to map the
semantic space of intellectual humility as a heuristic to support philo-
sophical and psychological analysis of this disposition. We find three
semantic clusters that compose intellectual humility: the sensible self,
the discreet self, and the inquisitive self; likewise, we find three clusters
that compose its contraries: the overrated self, the underrated other, and
the underrated self.
Keywords: Intellectual humility, psycholexical analysis, semantics, syn-
onymy, antonymy
1 Introduction
The study of personality and conceptions of personality has been pursued by
psychologists and other researchers in various ways, including among others ob-
servations in laboratory settings and field experiments, correlational studies of
survey responses, and psycholexical analyses. The present research embodies the
latter methodology, and is informed by both philosophical theory and mathe-
matical modeling tools developed in physical science.
Psycholexical analysis dates back to Francis Galton’s Measurement of Char-
acter [1]. The basic idea is that, all else being equal, a natural language is more
likely to include a predicate for a property to the extent that the property is im-
portant to those who speak the language. English has the word ‘defenestration’
because it’s been important to be able to talk about events in which someone is
thrown out a window. It lacks a word for someone being thrown in a window be-
cause, over the last several centuries, such events didn’t seem sufficiently worth
talking about. This is not to say that every phrase or term refers. There are no
2 Markus Christen, Mark Alfano, and Brian Robinson
unicorns despite the existence of the term ‘unicorn’. Nor is it to say that every-
thing worth talking about is represented by a phrase or singular term. Words
are sometimes coined because new phenomena come into existence or become
important; words are also sometimes coined because extant phenomena could
not otherwise be parsimoniously described and explained. Sometimes a speaker
coins words to describe or explain phenomena for which a word already exists,
but of which the coiner is ignorant. So words that are synonyms emerge, further
emphasizing the importance of the phenomena referred to. Regardless, the rough
generalization that there is a strong positive correlation between the importance
of phenomena in the lives of the speakers of a language and the probability of
the existence of a term in the language that refers to those phenomena is hard to
deny. If this is on the right track, studying psychological language is an indirect
way of studying the psychological properties people care about.
Psychologists in the psycholexical tradition don’t stop there, though. They
also typically argue that the semantic structure of a language reflects to some
extent the perceived structure of the phenomena described by the language. In
personality psychology, this insight was used by Allport and Odbert [2] to create
a semantic taxonomy of thousands of personality-relevant terms, which they
argued represents how people conceive of personality. Of course, the step from
language to people’s conception of personality is not identical to the step from
their conception of personality to actual personality, but it’s natural to think
that there will be at least a positive correlation – if only a weak one – between
how we think about personality and how personality actually is. This two-step
connection (from language about personality to conceptions of personality, from
conceptions of personality to actual personality) has been empirically validated
by personality models such as the Big Five [3] and Big Six [4, 5].
The Big Six includes an H factor that represents facets of personality related
to honesty and humility. Intellectual humility seems to involve a consciousness
of the limits of one’s knowledge, including sensitivity to circumstances in which
one’s native egocentrism is likely to function self-deceptively [6], though others
regard it as more of a ”second-order” open-mindedness [7]. In our age of infor-
mation, intellectual humility has grown all the more relevant. However, little
conceptual or empirical work has explored this trait. We think that the psy-
cholexical approach is especially promising in the investigation of intellectual
humility because questionnaires are likely to be especially unreliable as mea-
sures of this construct. Someone who is genuinely humble is unlikely to report
being humble, and someone who reports being humble is unlikely to be humble.
Humility – whether intellectual, moral, or otherwise – seems to involve a paradox
of self-attribution.
Additionally, our investigation is motivated by Aristotle’s [8] insight, reiter-
ated in contemporary philosophy by Roberts and Wood [6], that a virtue (i.e.,
a positive value-laden personality disposition or dimension of individual differ-
ence) is often best understood in the context of related virtues and the vices they
oppose. Put a different way, by contextualizing a term for a virtue in the constel-
lation of its near-synonyms and its near-antonyms, we can create a perspicuous
The Semantic Space of Intellectual Humility 3
representation of the meaning of the term. For these reasons, we propose to inves-
tigate the trait of intellectual humility psycholexically by comparing ‘intellectual
humility’ with both its antonyms and synonyms.
2 Method
Our analysis is based on the assumption that the practice of language is precipi-
tated in dictionaries, lexicons, and other wordbooks. Of particular interest is the
thesaurus – a language reference book or database organized to help its users
find words related to a concept but having slightly different shades of meaning
or connotation. Thesauruses reflect what people in their daily use of language –
in particular when writing text – consider semantically similar to a given term.
In other words, a thesaurus lists synonyms in a broad sense. Modern thesauruses
also list antonyms, which are then again related to a set of their own synonyms.
The present research explores the semantic space of intellectual humility
by first identifying the most common synonyms and antonyms of ‘intellectual
humility’. Next, by referring to the thesaurus.com database (the largest online
thesaurus for American English), we associate each identified term with a word-
bag, which is the set of synonyms listed for that term. The semantic constellation
of a term t is thus an ordered pair (t, T ), whose first element is t itself and whose
second element is t’s word-bag T = {t, tsyn1 , tsyn2 , tsyn3 , . . . , tsynn }, i.e., the set of
synonyms of t (including t itself). By comparing semantic constellations of two
terms t1 and t2 , we then create a similarity metric S by calculating the relative
overlap of each pair of word-bags as follows:
|T 1 ∩ T 2 |
S(t1 , t2 ) = (1)
min{|T 1 |, |T 2 |}
The similarities calculated in this way are then used in a novel clustering
and visualization tool that generates a semantic map of the terms involved.
More specifically:
1. We identified potential synonyms and antonyms for ‘intellectual humility’ in
three ways:
a) We searched philosophy and psychology journals for articles that discuss
intellectual humility; we found 24 papers or related texts (such as calls
for proposals or abstracts).
b) We performed an Internet search for entries on ‘intellectual humility’ and
found 20 entries that dealt in a significant way with the concept.
c) We identified scales that are used in psychology for constructs that have
some similarity to intellectual humility (e.g., the H factor of the Big Six
personality inventory).
In all these texts, we identified terms that are used to represent the meaning
of ‘intellectual humility’ or its relevant vices.
2. Four raters that have experience with the philosophical topic of intellectual
humility assessed all terms collected in step 1 to determine whether they
4 Markus Christen, Mark Alfano, and Brian Robinson
could be used to express the concept of intellectual humility or a related
vice. A term was kept on the list if three out of four raters agreed to do
so. In this way, we identified 52 synonyms and 69 antonyms for ‘intellectual
humility’. Each term was represented at least in noun form and usually in
adjective form also, for example: tolerance, tolerant.
3. We identified all entries for each term generated in step 2 in the thesaurus.com
database to generate word-bags for each synonym and antonym. For exam-
ple, the word-bag for ‘tolerance’ included all entries on thesaurus.com for
the term set tolerance, tolerant.
4. Next, we calculated the similarity in overlap between every pairwise combi-
nation of word-bags. For example, the word-bag of ‘tolerance’ contains 55
terms and the word-bag of ‘broadmindedness’ contains 40 terms. 12 terms
are contained in both word-bags. Hence, the similarity between ‘tolerance’
and ‘broadmindedness’ is 12/40 = 0.3. In this way, the similarity measures
are always between 0 (no similarity) and 1 (one word-bag is completely con-
tained in the other word-bag).
5. We checked for highly similar terms (S > 0.5).4 We collapsed the word-
bags of these terms into a single word-bag to reduce the number of syn-
onyms/antonyms. Conceptually, it’s unclear whether terms that share more
than half of their semantic constellations represent genuinely distinct con-
structs. In this way, we reduced the number of synonyms from 52 to 39 and
the number of antonyms from 69 to 46. When two terms were collapsed, our
raters kept the term that in their estimation was better known. A new word-
bag was created combining those of the two collapsed terms (and eliminating
redundancies). In cases where the word-bag of a term t overlapped with two
or more other terms by > 0.5 whose mutual overlap was, however, below the
cutoff-value, the raters determined collapsing based on the highest mutual
overlaps. This occurred 2 times for the synonyms and 8 times for of the
antonyms. For all condensed word-bags, the similarities were re-calculated.
Step 5 was not iterated.
6. The similarity measures obtained in this way were then used as inputs in
a visualization algorithm called superparamagnetic agent mapping, which
employs self-organizing agents governed by the dynamics of a clustering al-
gorithm inspired by spin physics to generate denoised low-dimensional rep-
resentations for which the characteristics of nonlinear data structures are
preserved or even emphasized. To conceptualize this mapping, imagine each
term as a particle that naturally repels all other particles. However, as over-
lap between two terms increases, they become more attracted to each other.
Thus, superparamagnetic agent mapping typically produces clumping, where
several particles clump together (connoting similarity) while collectively re-
pelling a different cluster (connoting collective difference between the two
clusters). It has been shown [9] that this method is superior to standard
4
This cut-off value was chosen based on a logarithmic count of the long-tailed distance
distribution such that the tail was cut off before the beginning of the main mode of
the distribution (i.e., the largest mode in a multi-modal distribution).
The Semantic Space of Intellectual Humility 5
methods such as factor analysis, principal components analysis, and multidi-
mensional scaling in preserving the topology of the data space with clustered
data. Since such a map will never precisely display the real topology of the
original, high-dimensional space, we calculated for each point on the map the
sum of the differences between the point and all its neighbors both in the
map and in the original space (normalized to the longest distance in either
case). The lower this sum, the better the map displays the real distance dis-
tribution of a point from its neighbors in the original space, so this number
is a proxy for the quality of the map.5 To increase the heuristic value of the
maps, we rescaled the sizes of the points themselves so that larger points
indicate greater topological certainty.
7. Finally, using the same clustering paradigm in an adapted version from [10],
we identified clusters on the map generated in step 6.
Step 7 generates the maps below that are then used to inform our reasoning
about intellectual humility.
3 Results
We produced three maps to convey our results. Figure 1 is the synonym map,
showing the degree of overlap among intellectual humility’s 39 synonyms. The
terms predominantly cluster into three groups. The first group (displayed in
green) we have labeled the Sensible Self and is exemplified by terms such as
‘comprehension,’ ‘responsiveness’, and ‘mindfulness’. We take this cluster to be
representative of the notion that an intellectually humble person will be open and
responsive to new ideas and information. Interestingly, ‘sympathy’ is also in this
cluster, indicating that there at least can be an emotional component to this sort
of intellectual humility. The second (pink) cluster we call the Inquisitive Self ;
it is illustrated by terms such as ‘curiosity’, ‘exploration’, and ‘learning’. The
difference between the Sensible Self and the Inquisitive Self indicates that there
is some difference between seeking new information or ideas and being open
to them when they are presented. Third, we have named the blue cluster the
Discreet Self, which is typified by ‘humility’, ‘decency’, and ‘unpretentiousness’.
It is worth noting that the discreet cluster is further removed from the other two
than the sensible and inquisitive clusters are from each other and that this part
of the map most accurately displays the original topology of the high dimensional
space. This would seem to indicate that intuitiveness and sensibility are more
closely conceptually related to each other than either is to discreetness. Finally,
some terms (shown in black) have intermediate positions among these groups
(e.g., ‘flexibility’ and ‘tolerance’) and do not fit neatly within any cluster.
Figure 2 shows the results of the antonym map, displaying the degree of
overlap between intellectual humility’s 46 antonyms. The first result to notice is
∑ ∑ d (xi ,xj ) d (xi ,xj )
5
This map aberration index, defined as i j | maxjorig.
{dorig. (xi ,xj )}
− maxjmap
{dmap (xi ,xj )}
|,
also serves as quality measure when comparing different types of visualizations like
MDA or PCA; see [9] for further details.
6 Markus Christen, Mark Alfano, and Brian Robinson
comprehension sensitiveness
sympathy
judgment sensitivity interest
0.4 Sensible benevolence
Self understanding awareness
intelligence insight discernment
agreement wisdom
0.2 attentiveness
mindfulness
responsiveness
science
tolerance
learning
0.0
circumspection broadmindedness
curiosity inquiry
earnest
adjustability
scrutiny
exploration
- 0.2 flexibility
openmindedness
acceptance
Inquisitive
impartiality Self
- 0.4 clarity
unpretentiousness integrity
- 0.6
decency Discreet
humility
demureness Self
humbleness
- 0.4 - 0.2 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6
Fig. 1. IH Synonym map.
that almost all the terms are aligned along one dimension and cluster at each
endpoint. We take this to represent the distinction between underrating and
overrating. The larger, red cluster can be thought of as the Overrated Self, and
includes terms such as ‘vanity, ‘pride’, and ‘arrogance’. This cluster suggests that
one way not to be intellectually humble is to be overly focused on one’s own high
status. Overrating oneself is not, however, the only way to fail to be intellectually
humble. The opposite endpoint has two closely related clusters that indicate two
other ways. There is the Underrated Other in purple (typified by terms such as
‘bias’, ‘prejudice’, and ‘unfairness’) and the Underrated Self cluster in orange,
which is similar in that it involves underrating, but the object of underrating
is oneself. This cluster is characterized by terms such as ‘diffidence’, ‘timidity’,
and ‘acquiescence’. This cluster suggests that there is such a thing as being
too humble, such that one’s lack of pride ceases to have any positive value.
It is worth noting how close the two (orange and purple) underrated clusters
are relative to the (red) overrated cluster. This indicates that there is a higher
degree of similarity based on the nature of the rating (over or under) than on
The Semantic Space of Intellectual Humility 7
submissiveness timidity
spinelessness servility
Underrated diffidence
unfairness
Self acquiescence prejudice
bias
1.0 chauvinism
narrowmindedness
bigotry
obstinacy stubbornness
dogmatism
inflexibility
animosity
0.5 Underrated
Other
obtuseness
aloofness
0.0
overbearance imperiousness
contemptuousness
airs chutzpah
hubris
overconfidence
- 0.5 grandiosity
pretension arrogance
pretentiousness
pomposity cockiness
ostentation presumption
bragging
vainglory swaggerer
selfimportance
Overrated
vanity boastfulness
boasting
egocentrism
smugness
egotism pride
Self
selfcenteredness- 1.0 - 0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5
Fig. 2. IH Antonym map.
who is being evaluated (self or other). Note also that there is no overrated other
cluster – which may either indicate that this disposition is conceptually unrelated
to intellectual humility, or simply that our methodology didn’t uncover terms
related to this disposition. Finally, we again see several terms (such as ‘hubris’,
‘chutzpah’, and ‘aloofness’) in white circles in the middle, indicating that these
terms do not fit within any cluster.
Finally, in Figure 3, we mapped all synonyms and antonyms together. We
preserved the colors from the two previous maps. The resulting map retains many
of the structural features of the previous maps, but with a few significant changes.
First, it reveals that for the antonyms the linear structure along the poles of
the Overrated Self and the Underrated Other is mainly preserved, whereas the
terms on the Underrated Self (orange) are in the same region as the terms
for the Discreet Self (blue) from the synonym set. Additionally, the distinction
between the terms for the Sensible Self (green) and Inquisitive Self (pink) is
no longer discernible. This second merger merely indicates that the difference
between the Inquisitive Self and the Sensible Self is large enough to be significant
8 Markus Christen, Mark Alfano, and Brian Robinson
spinelessness diffidence
decency
timidity humbleness
humility demureness obtuseness
acquiescence unpretentiousness
submissiveness integrity
servility
2
clarity
flexibility acceptance
impartiality
agreement
openmindedness earnest
broadmindedness responsiveness
adjustability exploration benevolence sympathy intelligence
1
tolerance scrutiny learning insight judgment
unfairness understanding
inquiry science attentiveness
bias curiosity comprehension
chauvinism prejudice wisdom circumspection
bigotry mindfulness awareness
narrowmindedness stubbornness sensitivity discernment
obstinacy sensitiveness
animosity
dogmatism
inflexibility
0
interest
-1
aloofness
imperiousness
overbearance
- 2 chutzpah overconfidence
contemptuousness presumption
hubris
cockiness
arrogance
airs swaggerer
pomposity vainglory
pretentiousness boastfulness
ostentation selfimportance
pride egocentrism
pretension smugness
grandiosity vanity egotism 0 1 2
boasting
bragging selfcenteredness
Fig. 3. Unified synonyms and antonyms map.
when compared to the Discreet Self, but small enough not to be significant when
compared to intellectual humility’s antonyms.
4 Discussion and Conclusion
From these results, there are three points we wish to draw out for discussion.
First, there is the matter of what the clusters represent. In the antonyms map,
we take each cluster to represent a distinct vice, i.e., a different way one can fail
to be intellectually humble. For the synonyms, however, two possibilities exist.
It might be that each cluster represents a distinct trait, all three of which go by
the same name of ‘intellectual humility’. Opposing this semantic diversity thesis
is the alternate interpretation that sees each cluster representing a different facet
of the single trait of intellectual humility.
Second, consider the merging of the synonym-based Discreet Self and antonym-
based Underrated Self in the combined map. We see two possible interpretations.
The Semantic Space of Intellectual Humility 9
It might be that the discreet aspect of intellectual humility is essentially akin
to underrating oneself. Snow [11] and Taylor [12] both argue that humility es-
sentially involves recognizing one’s low status or personal faults. If this is right,
then either the discreet aspect of humility is more of a vice than a virtue, or the
underrated aspect of humility’s antonyms is more of a virtue than a vice. Either
way, the valence of one or both of these semantic clusters may need to change.
Alternatively, there might be two different traits picked out by these clusters –
one a virtue and the other a vice – that are behaviorally similar enough that they
are easily conflated. Someone who underrates herself will behave very similarly
to a discreet person. They will both not regularly speak up about controversial
topics, in praise of themselves, or for their own rights and entitlements, mak-
ing it difficult to differentiate them behaviorally. There could, however, be an
underlying psychological difference that typically goes unobserved. The discreet
person may not often attend to evaluating herself, but when she does so, she
does it accurately. One who underrates herself, however, may pay significant at-
tention to her own merits, but regularly devalue them. Further research on the
behavioral and psychological aspects of intellectual humility and its contraries
may help to answer this question.
The third point relates back to the Big Six personality inventory [4, 5]. As
mentioned, the H factor is meant to represent facets of personality related to
honesty and humility. The 100-item revised version measures the participant’s
humility (specifically her modesty) by having her indicate (dis)agreement with
statements such as ”I am an ordinary person who is no better than others.”
We worry that the Big Six therefore includes in its H dimension items that are
better understood as contrary to humility, not allied with or constitutive of it.
Finally, we remind three shortcoming of our study. First, the nature of the
data does not allow to decide, whether the similarities found only reflet purely
pragmatic use of words within (American) English, or whether they actually
represent relations between mental concepts. This requires additional empirical
research that is currently in preparation. Second, the similarity measure used
may misguide the analysis as we do not take into account differences in usage
frequency of terms. For example, two pairs of terms may share an overlapping
set of the same relative size – but in one case the overlap may consist of terms
that are very frequently used as synonyms for the terms under investigation,
whereas in the other case, the word bags share synonyms that are only very
rarely used. It would be plausible to treat these two cases different – however,
this would again need additional empirical data on how frequent certain terms
are used as synonyms. To diminish this problem, services like Google Ngram
(https://books.google.com/ngrams) could be used for obtaining proxy data re-
garding term frequency in synonymy relations. Third, our current methodology
requires manual coding for term collapsing, as there is no biunique way of merg-
ing word bags. Although manual coding was feasible in our case, for larger term
sets this approach may reach its limits. However, in our case, manual coding was
mainly used to decrease the number of synonyms/antonyms and to allow for vi-
sualizations that are easier to understand. One may skip this part to the cost
10 Markus Christen, Mark Alfano, and Brian Robinson
that the resulting maps are harder to interpret. In ongoing research where we
aim for inter-lingual comparison (English and German), we skipped manual cod-
ing and found, that the qualitative results remained but that a richer structure
was visible, which helps to better understand differences across languages.
Acknowledgments. We thank Daniel Lapsley, ACE Collegiate Professor and
Chair of the Department of Psychology of the University of Notre Dame, and
Paul C. Stey, Department of Psychology of the University of Notre Dame, for
their input to this research. This work was made possible through a grant from
the Thrive Center at Fuller Theological Seminary.
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