Chapter 12 Science, Humility, and the Galileo Affair
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In his landmark work, After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that the virtues must be socially located since practical rationality requires the transmission of habits of excellence from the expert to the novice. In the Aristotelian tradition, science functions in a similar way to ethics since both have truth as their telos and require specific habits of the mind without which the practitioner cannot achieve her goal. Science so construed therefore represents an arena in which the acquisition of the “intellectual virtues” should play a critical role. Chief among those virtues is humility. Unless the scientist develops the virtue of humility she will fail to consider plausible options in the practice of her discipline. In this essay, I consider two historic episodes that demonstrate the centrality of humility to genuine scientific practices: (1) Galileo’s failure to consider the elliptical orbit of the planets, and (2) the resistance to Einstein’s theory of relativity.