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On Epistemological Humility

There’s a certain kind of intelligence that doesn’t get much attention. It doesn’t sound smart in a room. But it may be one of the most crucial forms of wisdom: the ability to say, “I don’t know how you experience the world.”

That’s epistemological humility. Not just a fancy phrase for being modest about knowledge, but something deeper and more unsettling: the recognition that other minds may be structured in fundamentally different ways, and that our access to those minds is limited at best.

Philosophically, epistemology is the study of knowledge, including how we know what we know, and what counts as valid understanding. Humility in this context isn’t about acting polite, but rather acknowledging that your model of the world, no matter how refined, is still just a model. Not reality itself. And certainly not a universal one.

Think of sensory experiences. Some people can see music as color. (This is synesthesia–which I have!) Others cannot form a single mental image—they have no “mind’s eye” (aphantasia, only recently coined).  Some feel chills from whispering voices or tapping sounds (ASMR). Others find those same sounds grating or meaningless. There are those who have never felt sexual attraction, and others who feel it daily, unpredictably, in response to seemingly random things. And while most can imagine what it’s like to feel sad, not everyone understands what it means to be unable to feel pleasure at all, even from things once loved.

None of these differences make a person better or worse (at least, inherently). They’re just different architectures of perception. Different firmware. The deeper point is: they often go unnoticed, even unimagined. We live inside our own sensory, cognitive, and emotional frameworks, and we tend to assume that others share the same ones, too. But it’s entirely possible—probable, even—that some of the people closest to us experience the world in ways we couldn’t simulate if we tried.

There are philosophical echoes here of Wittgenstein’s idea that “if a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” Not because of language, but because the lion’s world—its frame of reference, its felt experiences—would be too alien. The words might be shared, but the meanings would not. (That being said, we’ve taught apes to communicate, and we sorta can with them, so I wonder how true or false this may be? I think chatting with a dolphin would be even more alien than a lion, though.)

A lion opening its mouth, but you can't understand what it's saying.

So what does epistemological humility require? Not suspicion of all truth. DEFINITELY not relativism. Just a recalibration of how much authority we assign to our own intuitions about others. The realization that when someone describes their internal experience, even if it seems absurd, it might be more accurate to treat their description as primary evidence—not something to be rationalized away, but something to be respected on its own terms.

It’s not just about sensory or neurological differences, either. Cultural, emotional, psychological contexts all shift perception. What registers as a minor inconvenience for one person might feel like a catastrophe for another… not because one is being dramatic, but because the internal reference scales differ.

This humility can also stretch through time. Imagine trying to have a meaningful conversation with someone from 4,000 years ago. Not just the language barrier, but the mental scaffolding underneath. What does a day mean to someone whose calendar isn’t solar? What does self mean in a culture that never imagined individuality as a fixed interior essence? When we read Sumerian literature (as I am right now), we might be surprised by how familiar some of it feels: instructions for living a good life (early self-help), adoring letters to your mother, anxiety over mortality. But the rhythm of the mind behind those concerns may still be alien. Their metaphors, categories, assumptions—these form a different grammar of experience.

There’s something eerie about that: the idea that our cognitive structures are not only different across individuals and cultures, but across eras. What we think of as natural—linear time, emotional introspection, even the concept of truth—may be period-specific conventions. If epistemological humility teaches anything, it’s that the further we get from our own defaults, the less we should trust our intuitions about what others “must” think or feel. Temporal distance adds a layer of distortion we often overlook. The past may echo with our questions, but it doesn’t always share our answers—or even the shape of our wondering.

This isn’t an argument against objectivity. It’s just a reminder that objectivity is never the default. It’s constructed, and always from a point of view.

The value of epistemological humility is not that it solves every misunderstanding, but that it reshapes the approach. Instead of assuming sameness until difference is proven, it flips the presumption. It creates space for uncertainty, and with it, curiosity. A willingness to ask, and to mean it: What is it like to be you?

I should note that I got the idea to go down this rabbit hole from being subscribed to the email newsletter from ClearerThinking.org, by Spencer Greenberg.