Introduction
After a long period of relative neglect, philosophers have recently given more attention to honesty as both a moral and intellectual virtue (see, e.g., Wilson Reference Wilson2018; Roberts and West Reference Roberts, West, Miller and West2020; King Reference King2021; Miller Reference Miller2021). At the same time, some attention has also recently been given to the topic of transparency (Elliot Reference ElliotForthcoming; Kogelmann Reference KogelmannForthcoming; Nguyen Reference NguyenForthcoming), including one work which has provided an account of transparency as an intellectual virtue (Byerly Reference Byerly2021). In light of this research, we might wonder how the virtues of intellectual honesty and intellectual transparency are related. This question mirrors similar questions that virtue epistemologists have explored concerning the relationships between such seemingly similar virtues as intellectual attentiveness and intellectual carefulness (Baehr Reference Baehr2015), intellectual perseverance and intellectual courage (Battaly Reference Battaly2017), and intellectual fair-mindedness and intellectual charity (King Reference King2021). More generally, the project of identifying the relationships between apparently similar virtues is one that has taken on more importance for some authors in recent years, as work in virtue theory has led to a “proliferation” of candidate virtues (Russell 2009). An understanding of the way in which candidate virtues relate to one another can help theorists to map out, so to speak, how various virtues fit together in the structure of good character, identifying cases in which seemingly similar virtues make distinctive contributions as well as cases in which candidate virtues are rendered redundant.
The purpose of this paper is to advance understanding of intellectually virtuous honesty, by examining the relationship between a recent account of intellectual honesty and a recent account of intellectual transparency. The account of intellectual honesty comes from Nathan King (2021), who adapts the work of Christian Miller (Reference Miller, Sinnot-Armstrong and Miller2017, Reference Miller2021) on moral honesty. This account has been selected, in part, because Miller's work on honesty represents the most thorough investigation of honesty in contemporary philosophical research, and King's is the most thorough adaptation of this work to intellectual honesty. The account of intellectual transparency is taken from Byerly (Reference Byerly2021), which provides to my knowledge the only contemporary philosophical account of transparency as an intellectual virtue of individuals. After introducing the respective accounts, I will identify four potential differences between intellectual honesty and intellectual transparency as understood by these accounts. I then turn to the question of how to think about the relationship between these traits in light of these potential differences. I make the case that intellectual transparency can either be regarded as an exceptionally strong or ideal variety of intellectual honesty, or it can be regarded as a distinct virtue from intellectual honesty which is a more cardinal virtue than the latter. Along the way, I will also note some places where a case can be made that Miller's and King's accounts of honesty and intellectual honesty are in need of refinement or clarification. Thus, by examining Miller's and King's conceptualizations of honesty and intellectual honesty alongside Byerly's account of intellectual transparency, I hope to advance theoretical understanding of intellectual honesty and its relationship to intellectual transparency.
1. Two recent accounts of intellectual honesty and intellectual transparency
We can start by considering Miller's account of moral honesty, which King adapts to provide an account of intellectual honesty. For Miller, moral honesty is ultimately concerned with avoiding distorting the facts. As he puts it in an initial characterization of the virtue, honesty “is the virtue of being disposed, centrally and reliably, to not distort the facts as the agent sees them” (Miller Reference Miller2021: 38).
As Miller makes clear, distorting the facts as one sees them involves representing things as being a certain way to others, when one does not in fact take things to be this way. To do this intentionally, one needn't do it in accordance with a conscious plan. But, some kind of positive psychological orientation toward representing things one way while taking things to be another way must be present at either a conscious or an unconscious level (2021: 30–1). One is dishonest when one misrepresents things to others because one favors doing so either consciously or unconsciously. One is honest when one reliably avoids being dishonest in this sense.
Miller argues that thinking of honesty in this way makes good sense of our practices of attributing honesty or dishonesty. For instance, in typical cases at least, when people lie, they intend to get other people to believe a claim p that they themselves think is false by asserting p. Similarly, deception more broadly involves trying to get others to believe a claim p when one does not believe p or one believes p to be false, though it needn't involve one asserting p. Dishonest cheating, too, involves trying to get others to think one is abiding by the rules, when one recognizes that one is not abiding by them. And dishonest stealing likewise involves presenting things one does not believe to be one's own as being one's own. In each case, dishonest behavior involves representing things as being one way when one takes them to be another way, while honest behavior involves avoiding being dishonest in these ways.
The initial characterization of honesty given above is not where Miller ends his account. After discussing various objections to the account, he adds several additional features to it.Footnote 1 To be honest, a person's avoidance of distorting the facts must be motivated by virtuous motives – though Miller is a pluralist about which motives are allowed. To be honest, one cannot experience strong non-virtuous motivations to distort the facts, as this would make one continent rather than virtuous. To be honest, one's avoidance of distorting the facts must be in accordance with the dictates of capacities associated with practical wisdom, such as specifying what counts as honesty in particular situations and deliberating well about the means to achieving this end. There is much more that could be said about these qualifications, and I will return to some of them where relevant below. But for now, our purposes are better served by turning to how King adapts Miller's account to provide an account of intellectual honesty.
King (Reference King2021: 135) and Miller (Reference Miller2021: 111) agree that the main distinction between moral honesty and intellectual honesty has to do with their motivations. Intellectually virtuous honesty requires motivations for epistemic goods specifically, whereas moral honesty may be motivated in other ways. As King puts it, “The intellectually honest person is motivated by a desire to convey and not distort the truth because she cares about truth as such. The morally honest person need not care about truth in precisely the same way. She might instead be motivated to speak the truth and avoid distorting it because she wants to respect others, to avoid harming them, to be kind to them, or the like” (2021: 135). Indeed, roughly this way of distinguishing between moral and intellectual honesty, and moral and intellectual versions of other character virtues, is very common in the literature (cf., e.g., Zagzebski Reference Zagzebski1996; Baehr Reference Baehr2011; Wilson Reference Wilson2018).
Interestingly, in his brief comments about intellectual honesty, Miller suggests that this trait would only be concerned with promoting the agent's own epistemic goods. He writes, “I understand epistemic honesty as primarily concerned with how someone comes to form beliefs” (2021: 111). Thus, intellectual honesty, like Bernard Williams's (Reference Williams2002) virtue of “accuracy”, is concerned with doing the best one can to get to the truth. Yet, this suggestion from Miller may seem overly restrictive, given the widely accepted fact that intellectual virtues can involve motivations to promote others’ epistemic goods and not just the agent's own epistemic goods (see, e.g., Zagzebski Reference Zagzebski1996; Kawall Reference Kawall2002; Roberts and Wood Reference Roberts and Wood2007; Baehr Reference Baehr2011; Battaly Reference Battaly and van Hooft2014; King Reference King2021).
It is instructive in this regard that King is very clear that as he understands intellectual honesty, it does involve a concern for others and not just the self. Principally, the intellectually honest person is motivated to avoid deceiving others, leading them to form beliefs that the honest person believes are false. Depending on whether self-deception is possible, King also suggests that intellectual honesty can be directed toward oneself (2021: 139–40), which is very similar to what Miller says about self-deception (2021: 58–63). Thus, somewhat ironically, King's intellectual honesty is more similar to Miller's moral honesty than Miller's intellectual honesty is. For King, intellectual honesty involves avoiding distorting the facts to both others and to oneself, out of virtuous epistemic motives. As he puts it in his formal account, “Intellectual honesty is a disposition to express the truth (as we see it) through our thought, speech, and behavior, to avoid intentionally distorting the truth (as we see it), and to do so because we revere the truth and think it is valuable” (2021: 145).
King argues that someone who reveres truth in this way and who is thereby disposed to express the truth and not distort it will typically avoid all kinds of deception. This would include lying, plagiarising, misleading through providing incomplete information or even through not speaking at all, and bull-shitting in the sense of presenting oneself as participating in truth-aimed inquiry when one is not (2021: 135–41). In all these cases, the deceptive behavior involves distorting the truth to others in a way that is inconsistent with the kind of reverence for the truth that is characteristic of intellectual honesty.
We now turn finally to briefly introducing Byerly's account of intellectual transparency. For Byerly, intellectual transparency is one of the virtues of the “intellectually dependable person” – the sort of person on whom others can depend in their inquiries. The specific domain of intellectual transparency has to do with sharing one's perspective with others. As an intellectual virtue, intellectual transparency is oriented toward and ultimately motivated by promoting others’ epistemic goods. Thus, as Byerly defines it, intellectual transparency is “a tendency to faithfully share one's perspective on topics of others’ inquiries with these others out of a motivation to promote their epistemic goods” (2021: 105).
Because more will be said below about distinctive features of intellectual transparency as Byerly understands it, more needn't be said at this stage. However, what has already been said is enough to raise our focal question about the relationship between intellectual honesty and intellectual transparency. The traits do, after all, appear to overlap in many respects. Both seem to involve some kind of other-oriented epistemic motivation. And both seem to involve tendencies to engage in faithful communication of how one sees things, oriented and ultimately grounded in this epistemic motivation. Thus, we might wonder how exactly the traits are related. To aid in answering this question, I will first identify four potential differences between the traits.
2. Potential differences between intellectual honesty and intellectual transparency
This section will identify four potential differences between intellectual honesty as understood by King and Miller and intellectual transparency as understood by Byerly. These differences are flagged as “potential” differences for two reasons. First, Miller (Reference Miller2021: 32) stresses that his aim is only to provide central and illuminating necessary conditions for the virtue of honesty, and that he does not claim to have provided sufficient conditions for honesty. While King does not address the question of necessary and sufficient conditions explicitly, it may be that his aims are similarly modest. Now the differences to be highlighted in this section are all differences where it seems that intellectual transparency requires something that intellectual honesty does not. Thus, it may be that these differences highlight only additional necessary conditions that King or Miller would on reflection accept as characterizing intellectual honesty, but that they just did not specify in their accounts. Second, the differences are also flagged as “potential” differences because, at least in some cases, the appearance of a difference has to do with a lack of clarity in King's or Miller's accounts. There are competing interpretations available as to how they should be understood, and on some interpretations there's a real difference while on others there isn't. By identifying and discussing these potential differences, then, we might make some progress in clarifying what should or shouldn't be included in an account of (intellectual) honesty, and we might identify additional necessary conditions for the virtue of (intellectual) honesty that have not been noted in work on this topic previously. In either case, we stand to achieve a better understanding of the virtue and its relationship to intellectual transparency.
2.1. Skill
A first potential difference between intellectual honesty and intellectual transparency has to do with skill. In his discussion of intellectual transparency, Byerly stresses that at least two sets of skills are involved in the trait (2021: 107–10). In order to faithfully share one's perspective with others, the intellectually transparent person needs both skills that enable them to accurately grasp what their perspective is as well as skills that enable them to communicate this perspective to others effectively.
The importance of these two sets of skills is illuminated when we consider what Byerly has in mind by a person's “perspective”. Along with others (e.g., Riggs Reference Riggs and Battaly2019), Byerly understands perspectives to be richly complex things. They include a person's beliefs, but also their intuitions, experiences, conceptual schemes, arguments, and evidential standards. This helps us to appreciate that accurately understanding what one's perspective involves does not come automatically. To share your perspective with others, you've got to first gain a decent handle on what your perspective is. Intellectual transparency requires the kinds of skills in self-knowledge that enable a person to achieve this.
Intellectual transparency also involves skills in communicating one's perspective to others. This requires, for example, a sophisticated vocabulary for distinguishing between such things as when one believes p is false and when one does not believe p is true, or when one is in possession of an argument for p's truth and when one is in possession of a response to an argument for p's falsity. It also requires skill in enabling others to enter into and appreciate how things appear from one's perspective. Thus, virtuous intellectual transparency involves skills of self-understanding and skills of self-disclosure to others.
Does intellectual honesty require such skills? Does moral honesty? If we read what King and Miller say, it's not clear that these skills are required. There is no entry in either author's index for the term “skill”, and the term “skill” is never used in their discussion of these virtues. Still, a more thorough consideration of these authors’ ideas might suggest that while this topic is not one they address clearly and explicitly, they may be open to the idea of including such skills as a requirement of moral and intellectual honesty.
Let's take skills of self-knowledge first. Both King and Miller talk frequently of the facts “as the agent sees them”, which we might generously interpret as being roughly equivalent to talking about the agent's perspective. It's the facts as the agent sees them, or the agent's perspective, that the morally or intellectually honest person avoids distorting. This might suggest that the honest person must have a good grasp of the facts as they see them. And, we might think – reasonably – that in order to have a good grasp of the facts as they see them, the honest person must have the skills necessary for arriving at this good grasp.
On the other hand, Miller and King just aren't clear about this matter. They don't distinguish, for example, between the way the agent sees the facts and the way the agent sees the way they see the facts. And there's a difference. There are many ways we can go wrong in assessing how we see the facts. Or, to use the idiom of perspective, there are many ways we can misunderstand our perspectives. Do moral or intellectual honesty require that one has the skills to accurately assess how one sees the facts, or do they only require that one not distort the facts as one sees oneself as seeing them?
Perhaps what Miller and King say about self-deception and honesty is relevant here. They both suggest that if self-deception is possible, then honesty will incline one away from engaging in it. But, if honesty drives out self-deception, perhaps this will imply that it will ensure that one does not misunderstand one's perspective. Yet, this appeal to the relation between honesty and self-deception can't do all the work required here. The problem is that for both thinkers, self-deception is intentional (in the flexible sense of “intentional” noted above). If self-deception results in a misapprehension of one's perspective, it does so as the end of process that consciously or subconsciously favors this misapprehension. Yet, one can misapprehend one's perspective unintentionally, too, simply because one lacks the requisite skills to accurately apprehend one's perspective.
So, the question remains when it comes to skills of self-knowledge. These are required for intellectual transparency. Are they required for moral and intellectual honesty?
Let's turn to skills of self-disclosure. Here again, we find ambiguity in King's and Miller's discussions. One the one hand, King and Miller both discuss cases in which dishonesty is displayed in a way that requires skilful communication. For instance, King discusses a case of a student, Dave, who “bluffs” by not saying that he hasn't done the required reading, thereby dishonestly misleading his class and professor into thinking that he has done the reading (2021: 136–7). Miller discusses a case where a husband responds to his wife's question about his whereabouts by saying he was with the guys at the bar, but leaving out that afterward he went home with another woman, thereby misleading his wife (2021: 33). In these cases, the protagonists’ deception works because of complicated features of human communication having to do with implicatures (see King Reference King2021: 137) which the protagonists understand and exploit.
Do morally or intellectually honest people also need a good understanding of how human communication works in these respects, so that they can skilfully communicate the facts as they see them and avoid failing to do so on account of such mechanisms? This is less clear on King's and Miller's accounts. In part, the lack of clarity stems from the stress their accounts place on “intentionally” distorting the facts. After all, someone in Dave's or the cheating husband's circumstances might mislead the class or their wife in the same way Dave and the husband do, except that they don't do this intentionally but only because they lacked the requisite understanding of how implicatures work. The protagonists in these revised cases may not have any conscious or unconscious favorable stance toward misleading the recipients of their communications, but may nonetheless mislead them because they fail to recognise what their communications (or lack thereof) will implicate in their conversational context. Since they're not intentionally distorting the facts, it might seem they aren't failing to be honest according to Miller and King – and so honesty for them doesn't require the requisite skills in communication.
What Miller says about practical wisdom, however, might suggest an alternative conclusion.Footnote 2 As noted briefly in section 1, Miller proposes that the honest person's avoidance of distorting the facts must be done in accordance with the capacities associated with practical wisdom. What are these capacities? Drawing on the work of other authors, Miller identifies a broad range of functions that practical wisdom is thought to serve. Among these is the “instrumental function”, which involves deliberating excellently about the means to one's ends (2021: 121–2). It might seem that the operation of this deliberative capacity would include the exercise of the requisite skills in communication. For instance, if you have as an end avoiding deceiving others, and you deliberate well about the means to use to achieve this end, then it might be expected that you would not communicate in the ways Dave and the cheating husband do, generating the implicatures they do that mislead others, since communicating in this way is not a good means to your end of avoiding deceiving others.
Even here, however, things are not obvious. It's just not entirely clear whether deliberating well about the best means to the end of avoiding deceiving others requires that one possess and tend to exercise the relevant skills of self-disclosure. Does deliberating well about the best means to one's end of not deceiving others require that one takes the best means? Does deliberating well about the means to one's end require that one is sensitive to and aware of the appropriate means to begin with, or is it just a matter of deliberating well about the means one is aware of? Finally, if one's end is only to avoid deceiving others, and deception is intentional, then would deliberating well require that one not take means that involve clumsy communication resulting in unintentionally misleading implicatures? Whether Miller's appeal to honest activity being governed by the capacities associated with practical wisdom will imply that honesty requires sills of self-disclosure depends on the answers to these questions.
Ultimately, it isn't clear given what Miller and King say whether they think that the skills of self-knowledge and self-disclosure required by intellectual transparency are also required by moral or intellectual honesty. Thus, this is one potential difference between these traits.
2.2. Positivity
A second potential difference between intellectual transparency and moral and intellectual honesty concerns the degree of positivity involved in these traits. Miller's account of moral honesty, at least at first glance, appears to be entirely negative in the sense that what it requires is a tendency to avoid doing certain things, rather than a positive tendency to do certain things. For Miller, moral honesty is a tendency to avoid intentionally distorting the facts. Intellectual transparency, by contrast, is clearly a positive tendency – a tendency to share one's perspective with others out of a motivation to promote their epistemic goods. Thus, intellectual transparency seems to be more positive in the sense that it requires that its possessor is disposed to do a broad range of things and not just refrain from doing some things.
Now, Miller does consider at some length whether his account of moral honesty isn't positive enough. The most relevant part of his discussion is what he says about cases involving answering with silence. For instance, he considers an adaptation of the cheating husband case in which the wife asks the husband whether he went home with another woman last night and the husband simply remains silent and then walks away. Miller argues that in this case, the husband is being dishonest with the wife through his omission of the fact that he went home with another woman (2021: 68–70). Miller explains that omissions can involve distortions of the facts. Indeed, in the cheating husband case as presented earlier, the husband's omission is just such a case. Miller argues that in that case as well as the revised case here, the husband commits a “failure of honesty” by “trying to mislead” his wife (2021: 35). Thus, Miller argues that his account of honesty does require honest people to act positively in communicating information, and not only to refrain from communicating information, where to not act positively in communicating information would involve them in trying to mislead someone through omitting relevant information.
While this approach does point toward a way in which Miller's account requires some positivity of morally honest people, we can note that the positivity required has an important restriction. The honest person is expected to act positively in revealing the truth as they see it only when to do otherwise would involve them in trying to mislead someone. But, importantly, we could imagine cases like the cheating husband case in which the protagonist acts as he does not because he is trying to mislead his wife but because he just doesn't care much whether she arrives at the truth in the matter. The husband doesn't care whether his wife arrives at the truth or not, and so just ignores her question and refuses to offer any aid in her inquiry. Here he omits information not because of a positive motivation to deceive but because of the absence of a positive motivation of epistemic concern. Moral honesty, for Miller, doesn't require that the agent has a positive concern for others’ epistemic well-being; it only requires that the agent not consciously or unconsciously be in favor of doing others epistemic harm.
By contrast, intellectual transparency by definition requires both kinds of concern. When Byerly talks about sharing one's perspective out of a motivation to “promote other's epistemic goods”, he intends to include within this epistemic motivation both a concern not to do others epistemic harm and a concern to do others epistemic good. Indeed, the motivation here is intended to be a quite broad concern for others’ wholistic epistemic well-being (see Byerly Reference Byerly2021: Ch. 4) – a point we will return to in section 2.4. Thus, while Miller does argue that his account would require more positivity of the honest person than it might at first appear, there remains an important apparent difference in this respect between his account of moral honesty and Byerly's account of intellectual transparency.
Interestingly, some of King's remarks suggest that he is thinking of intellectual honesty as requiring more positivity than Miller requires of moral honesty. King's formal account of intellectual honesty, as we saw, appeals to positively expressing the truth and not just avoiding distorting the truth, and he maintains that intellectual honesty is motivated by a concern for and reverence for truth and not something more negative like an aversion to falsehood. Thus, we might think that King's intellectual honesty requires more of the relevant kind of positivity than Miller's moral honesty does.
Yet, we should tread carefully. King's strategy in developing his account of intellectual honesty is to begin by contrasting honest with dishonest behavior, and to argue that honesty must rule out all such behavior (2021: 135–40). But King conceptualizes all of the dishonest behaviors he considers in much the same way as Miller – as behaviors involving intentionally distorting the facts or acting deceptively. Thus, we might think that King's view is more akin to Miller's than the formal statement of his account suggests. Perhaps, as with Miller, the positive tendency to express the truth is only required where doing otherwise would involve intentionally distorting the truth. It may be that King views his inclusion of the positive requirement to express the truth as a redundant but pedagogically useful element of his account, given that he is writing not exclusively for a professional audience but for students. Certainly, King doesn't give an argument for including the expression requirement and not just the avoidance of distortion requirement. Ultimately, then, it is somewhat unclear just how positive King's intellectual honesty is supposed to be.
The main point of this section thus far has been to show that it is not clear that on Miller's and King's views, honesty requires the presence of a motivation to promote others’ epistemic well-being and not just the absence of a motivation to do others epistemic harm. But let's suppose for the sake of argument that they do wish to include at least some positive motivation to promote others’ epistemic well-being in their accounts, as one might think is suggested by some of King's remarks. Would the degree of positive motivation be as strong as that required by intellectual transparency? There is significant reason to be doubtful about this.
In developing his account of moral honesty, Miller considers five distinct sub-virtues that he thinks of as specific, narrower versions of honesty. One of these is “forthrightness”, defined as “the virtue of being disposed to reliably avoid misleading by giving a sufficient presentation of the relevant facts for good moral reasons” (2021: 20). It is precisely this sub-virtue of forthrightness that seems to be at work in the cases of answering with silence. Honesty demands more than silence in these cases because silence would be misleading. Yet, notably, Miller explicitly recognizes that forthrightness only requires more than silence in certain fairly high-stakes situations, and he contrasts the degree of forthcomingness required by forthrightness with that required by another virtue, which he calls “frankness”. As he puts it, “someone who is exhibiting virtuous frankness is sharing information in a supererogatory way, but without oversharing. More sharing is involved, in particular, than is required for forthrightness. … [O]ne can fail to be frank while still being honest” (2021: 20, n.48). Thus, on Miller's view, it would appear that honesty only requires at most a tendency to not omit facts as one sees them where omitting them would constitute a violation of the call of duty, though honesty does not require that one not omit facts as one sees them where sharing these facts would go beyond the call of duty. This also sits well with Miller's idea that honesty is a kind of justice (2021: 22–3). To be honest, in the sense of forthrightness, might be thought of as giving people what they deserve or have a right to epistemically.
Here again there is an apparent difference with intellectual transparency. Indeed, intellectual transparency may well be what Miller has in mind when he speaks of “frankness”. In being disposed to share their perspective faithfully with others out of a motivation to promote others’ epistemic well-being, the intellectually transparent person is not just motivated to share their perspective with others when others have an epistemic right to this, or when doing so is required by duty. Intellectual transparency includes this, but goes beyond it. The intellectually transparent person is ultimately motivated by a concern for the wholistic epistemic well-being of others. Byerly describes this motivation as “intellectual benevolence”, rather than a concern for justice.
Thus, there appear to be significant differences between Miller's and King's accounts of honesty and Byerly's account of intellectual transparency regarding their positivity. It may be that Miller's and King's accounts do not require that the honest person exhibits any positive motivation at all to promote others’ epistemic goods, but only that the honest person not have a motivation to do others epistemic harm. And, even if they would accept, on reflection, that the honest person must have some positive motivation to promote others’ epistemic goods, it appears that the intellectually transparent person's motivation to promote others’ epistemic goods will be stronger than that required by their accounts.
2.3. Truth
Thus far, I have written as if for both Miller and King, honesty – particularly intellectual honesty or forthrightness – ultimately has something to do with a concern for the epistemic quality of others’ beliefs. This interpretation is most strongly suggested by what they say about cases of dishonesty. Cases of dishonesty, for Miller and King, are uniformly presented as cases in which a person distorts the facts as they see them in such a way as to lead others to have a false belief. In fact, Miller argues that this is even involved in cases of cheating and stealing, and not just cases of lying or misleading. Thus, we might think that honesty ultimately has to do with a concern about, at least, the epistemic disvalue of others having false beliefs.
Yet, while I think this is a reasonable interpretation of the authors, there is nevertheless some ambiguity in their work on this subject, and I think it is worth exploring as it may again illuminate our understanding of intellectual honesty. Portions of both authors’ work give the impression that honesty is less concerned with epistemic impacts on others than it is with the semantic quality of one's own representations. By contrast, intellectual transparency as conceptualized by Byerly is straightforwardly concerned with the epistemic impact on others of sharing one's perspective faithfully.
Let's start with King. It is intriguing that in King's formal statement of his account, he claims that the intellectually honest person is motivated to express truth and avoid distorting it “because [they] revere the truth and think it is valuable” (2021: 145). There are at least two different ways this could be understood. It could be that King means that the intellectually honest person thinks it is valuable when others have true and not false beliefs. Or, it could be that King means that the intellectually honest person finds that truthful representations, such as true utterances or sentences, are valuable in themselves – and that the quality of truth that they have is to be revered. This is a subtle but noteworthy difference. Is honesty more about making truthful representations and less about the epistemic impact of one's representations on others? Or is it more about the epistemic impact of one's representations on others and less about the semantic quality of one's representations?
King's formal statement of his account is not the only place where he seems to suggest that honesty is concerned with the semantic value of truth and not with the epistemic value of others having true beliefs. For instance, he writes that it is “a reverence for truth itself” that distinguishes intellectual honesty from moral honesty (2021: 145). Likewise, “dishonest people fail to revere the truth” (2021: 141). And earlier in the chapter, he says that the intellectually honest person “cares about the truth as such” (2021: 135).
Moreover, some of King's examples might be read as suggesting that his view is that honesty is primarily concerned with valuing truthful representations. The case of Mary might be read this way. Mary is in the presence of someone she wants to impress who says in an arrogant tone, “Naturally, you know what I'm talking about”, referring to a book or author. Mary pipes up and says, no, she hasn't heard of it. King takes Mary to be exhibiting honesty here because Mary has “a healthy respect, even a reverence, for truth” (2021: 144). But what is motivating Mary here? Is it mainly that she doesn't want her interlocutor to persist in a false belief? Or is it something else? Could it be that what is motivating Mary here is something more like an aversion to making false statements? She just really doesn't like communicating falsehoods – it's not so much a concern about the interlocutor's beliefs that is driving her?
An example from Miller is even clearer. Miller considers a case of double-bluffing in which A knows that B is very skeptical of A's views of important matters, tending to believe the opposite of what they take A's views to be. Thus, A tells B that p, wanting B to believe the ¬p, which is true, and A succeeds. Miller counts this as a case of dishonesty, writing that this verdict is “captured by A's intentionally distorting the facts” (2021: 36). Yet, if A is “distorting the facts” here, it has only to do with A's representation not being truthful, rather than with A's intending to bring it about that B has a false belief.Footnote 3 Indeed, A's motives with respect to the epistemic quality of B's beliefs are admirable. Thus, Miller's discussion of this case seems to suggest that for him honesty has more to do with the semantic quality of one's communications and less to do with their intended epistemic effects.
This difference between a semantic and an epistemic focus for honesty makes a difference in a variety of other cases, too. One such case is the famous case of the Nazi at the door, discussed extensively by Miller. The Nazi asks if there are any Jews in your home, and there are. Miller favors the view that it is dishonest to not tell the Nazi about the Jews in this case. He emphasizes, of course, that virtues other than honesty could lead the honest person to be dishonest here. And similar points could be made about intellectual transparency and the way in which other virtues could point toward considerations that outweigh being transparent with the Nazi. Yet, what I want to point out here is that a semantic versus an epistemic approach to thinking about honesty does make a difference to this case. If honesty is primarily about making true and avoiding making false statements, and not so much about the epistemic effects of these statements, then honesty will speak more in favor of not lying to the Nazi. If honesty or intellectual transparency is more concerned with the intended epistemic effects of one's communications, it may speak less against lying. For, while telling the Nazi that there are Jews in your home may bring about the Nazi's true belief that there are Jews in your home, it may also bring about their false beliefs that, for example, it is morally permissible to burn your home to the ground and kill all living creatures inside. So, whether honesty is more concerned with semantic values or epistemic values makes some difference to the case.
Another kind of case where the semantic versus epistemic interpretation makes a difference is cases of communicating epistemically beneficial falsehoods (cf. Elgin Reference Elgin2004). Sometimes, communicating the truth about a subject would be extremely complex, and it may not even be within the competence of the recipient of your communications to understand the truth if you did communicate it. In such cases, another way of putting things that is just as good as true for many epistemic purposes may be available and much easier to communicate. If honesty is more concerned with semantic values than with epistemic values, then being honest would lead one to be more hesitant to communicate the epistemically beneficial falsehoods in such cases. By contrast, if intellectual honesty or transparency is more concerned with intended epistemic effects, it would involve less reticence to communicate these.
So, we have a third important apparent difference between Miller's and King's accounts of honesty and Byerly's account of intellectual transparency. Byerly's intellectual transparency is clearly concerned focally with promoting others’ epistemic goods. But, there is at least some ambiguity about whether Miller's and King's accounts of honesty are more concerned with the semantic value of one's communications than with the intended epistemic effects of these on others.
2.4. Non-doxastic epistemic values
The previous section raised questions about whether, for Miller and King, honesty is ultimately concerned with epistemic values at all, as opposed to semantic values. Let's suppose, however, that on their accounts honesty is concerned with epistemic values. Which epistemic values is it concerned with?
There is one particular epistemic value on which Miller's and King's accounts seem to focus most intensely. For Miller and King, honesty most obviously has to do with avoiding bringing it about that others have or persist in having false beliefs. It is in this way that honesty is contrasted with deception for these authors, since deception involves intentionally bringing it about that others have beliefs that are false by the deceiver's own lights. Indeed, it is easy to get the impression that for Miller and King, it is just the avoidance of bringing about this one epistemic disvalue of false belief for others that honesty is concerned with. Miller's examples of lying, misleading, cheating, stealing and promise-breaking can all be interpreted this way, as can King's examples of plagiarising, lying, bluffing and bull-shitting.
However, we did note in section 2.2 that King might require somewhat more positivity of honesty than Miller requires. It may be, in particular, that for King honesty is also concerned to some extent with bringing it about that others have or retain the epistemic good of true beliefs as well – at least under certain circumstances, such as where acting in this way is a requirement of duty. If King is to be understood in this way, then honesty is concerned with a slightly broader range of epistemic goods for others than it is on Miller's view. Yet, whether it is only the avoidance of bringing it about that others have false beliefs or whether under certain circumstances honesty also requires acting to ensure that others have true beliefs, we can notice that the focus in each case is on doxastic epistemic values – epistemic values pertaining to what others do or do not believe. This remains a focus on a rather narrow range of epistemic goods of others.
By contrast, intellectual transparency is concerned with sharing the varied aspects of one's perspective so as to promote the wide variety of epistemic goods in others’ perspectives. The intellectually transparent person can be expected to faithfully communicate their knowledge, ignorance, levels of confidence, experiences, arguments, questions, objections, conceptual schemes, and evidential standards to others when doing so will enhance the epistemic value of others’ perspectives. Sometimes in communicating these things the intellectually transparent person's aim is to avoid bringing it about that the recipient of their communication has a belief that is false by their lights, but this isn't always their aim. Likewise, sometimes their aim is to bring it about that the recipient of their communication has a belief that is true by their lights, but again this isn't always their aim. Overall, their aim is to improve or at least to avoid injuring the other person's epistemic position overall. There are many ways of doing this besides bringing it about that the other has a particular true belief or does not have a particular false belief.
Some illustrative examples may help. Suppose another person is inquiring into whether p, and both this person and the intellectually transparent person recognize that there is a variety of complicated evidence bearing on whether p. In an effort to improve the other person's overall perspective on whether p, the intellectually transparent person might communicate to the other person an argument they are aware of that has p or not-p as its conclusion. In doing so, they may broaden the other person's base of evidence bearing on whether p. But, in communicating this argument, their aim may not be to ensure that the other person does not believe something that is false by their lights, and it likewise may not be to ensure that the other person believes something that is true by their lights. Indeed, they themselves may neither believe nor disbelieve p, and they may likewise suspend judgment about the premises of the argument they communicate.
Similar points can be made about the communication of questions one has about arguments bearing on whether p, or objections one is aware of to arguments bearing on whether p. By communicating these, one may enhance the quality of the evidence base that others have to go on in evaluating whether p. But, by communicating these questions or objections, one needn't be aiming for the other person to believe p or to not believe p, and indeed one might not take a stance oneself on whether p is true or false. Related points can be made about communicating one's experiences or concepts. The primary aim in communicating these features of one's perspective needn't be to lead another person to have or not have a particular belief. It can still enhance the overall epistemic quality of a person's perspective to communicate these things, even where in doing so one is not aiming for the other to have or not have a particular belief.
It might be objected that receiving these communications would nonetheless affect the recipient's doxastic states. For instance, when communicating an argument one knows of for p or not-p, or an objection one knows of to such an argument, the recipient may acquire the beliefs that the intellectually transparent person is aware of these arguments or objections. And similar things could be said about the communication of experiences or concepts – the recipient may acquire or retain beliefs that the intellectually transparent person had these experiences or concepts. So, we might wonder whether intellectual transparency is, after all, concerned with doxastic epistemic goods for others – just like honesty is.
But it seems there is a clear response available to this objection. In communicating arguments or objections or questions or experiences one is aware of that bear on whether or not p, the primary aim of the intellectually transparent person is to directly influence the quality of the other person's perspective on whether p – not to lead the other person to have a particular higher-order view about the intellectually transparent person's perspective on p. What the intellectually transparent person cares about, primarily, is that the other person come to share access to certain aspects of their own perspective. They will typically be less interested in whether the recipient of their communications comes to hold second-order beliefs about these aspects being aspects of the intellectually transparent person's own perspective. Indeed, it is for this kind of reason that an intellectually transparent person might not share a certain aspect of their perspective with another inquirer, if they think the other inquirer already shares this aspect of their perspective. If their main interest were to bring it about that the other had second-order beliefs about the intellectually transparent person's perspective, then they would share this. But, given that their main goal is to enhance where possible the quality of the other person's inquiries, they are less likely to communicate aspects of their perspective that they know to be shared by the other person.
Thus, even if the intellectually transparent person's typical patterns of communication may lead others to form second-order beliefs about the transparent person's own perspective, intellectual transparency is often not focally concerned with leading others to have or not have beliefs. Sometimes the intellectually transparent person will share their own beliefs or disbeliefs with others with the aim of leading others to have or not have a belief. But this just isn't where their tendency to share their perspective ends. It extends much further than this, being oriented by a wholistic concern to enhance the epistemic quality of others’ perspectives quite broadly. By contrast, it would seem that on Miller's and King's views, honesty is focally concerned with avoiding leading others to have beliefs that are false by the honest person's own lights. At most, it may also involve leading others to have beliefs that are true by the honest person's own lights, under certain circumstances. But nothing Miller or King have said indicates that honesty includes a tendency to share one's perspective that goes beyond these two doxastically oriented aims.
3. The relationship between intellectual honesty and intellectual transparency
We have now uncovered four potential differences between intellectual honesty and intellectual transparency. While both traits involve tendencies to represent aspects of one's perspective out of a certain truth-oriented aim, these potential differences underscore important ways in which the traits may be unalike. In particular, it may be that intellectual transparency is more epistemically versus semantically oriented, more positive, more skilful, and more broadly concerned with others’ epistemic goods than intellectual honesty is – at least if honesty and intellectual honesty are understood as indicated by Miller and King.
Our question in this section concerns whether we should understand honesty and intellectual honesty to differ from intellectual transparency in these ways. Put differently, we want to ask whether, insofar as Miller and King do understand honesty and intellectual honesty to depart from intellectual transparency in these ways, they are correct about this. We want to ask this question as part of a broader effort to assess the relationship between intellectual honesty and intellectual transparency. Should we indeed understand honesty and intellectual honesty to differ from intellectual transparency in these ways? Depending on the answer, how should we assess the relationships between these traits?
I can only make a beginning toward answering these questions here. I suspect that virtue epistemologists may differ in how they are inclined to answer them. What I will do is point toward some considerations that are relevant for answering these questions, and that may lead some virtue epistemologists to answer them in particular ways. Ultimately, I will explain how a case can be made that intellectual transparency is either an exceptional variety of intellectual honesty, or it is a distinct virtue that is more cardinal than the intellectual honesty.
I want to begin by suggesting that one of the potential differences between intellectual honesty and intellectual transparency flagged in section 2 is one that, on reflection, many virtue epistemologists would conclude should not be accepted as a difference between the two. This is the difference highlighted in section 2.3 pertaining to whether intellectual honesty is more concerned with semantic or epistemic values. We saw that Miller and King sometimes write as if honesty or intellectual honesty is more concerned with making true or avoiding false representations than it is with influencing the epistemic quality of others’ inquiries. Yet, for many virtue epistemologists, it is simply definitional of intellectual virtues that they are partially constituted by and are structured by epistemic motivations. These epistemic motivations are motivations pertaining to epistemic values such as knowledge, true belief, understanding, or cognitive contact with reality (Montmarquet Reference Montmarquet1993; Zagzebski Reference Zagzebski1996; Roberts and Wood Reference Roberts and Wood2007; Baehr Reference Baehr2011; Battaly Reference Battaly2015). They are not motivations pertaining to semantic values that attach to communications. Thus, if intellectual honesty were understood to be more concerned with semantic values than with epistemic values, it just wouldn't qualify as an intellectual virtue. Since it is, ex hypothesi, supposed to qualify as an intellectual virtue – the intellectually virtuous variety of honesty – it should be concluded that it must be more concerned with epistemic values than with semantic values. Thus, it shouldn't be conceptualized as differing from intellectual transparency in this respect.
This judgment is reinforced by the examples noted in section 2.3 which highlight the important difference that a focus on semantic rather than epistemic values can make. An over-concern with semantic values can serve as an obstacle to promoting others’ epistemic goods, as it does in the case of double-bluffing or the case of epistemically useful falsehoods. As an intellectual virtue, intellectual honesty shouldn't be conceptualized as interfering with the promotion of epistemic value in this way. Thus, intellectual honesty should be understood, like intellectual transparency, to be more concerned with epistemic goods than semantic goods.
Let's consider some of the other potential differences. Some virtue epistemologists may also be inclined to think that intellectual honesty should not be understood to differ from intellectual transparency in terms of the skills identified in section 2.1. Here again, many virtue epistemologists have understood intellectual virtues to include distinctive skills that partially constitute them (Baehr Reference Baehr2017; Wright Reference Wright and Battaly2019). As a virtue concerned with communicating aspects of one's perspective in such a way as to promote epistemic goods for others, it would seem that the skills of self-knowledge and self-disclosure highlighted in section 2.1 are good candidates for the kinds of skills that would partially constitute intellectual honesty. Indeed, one might query whether intellectual honesty really qualifies as an excellence without including such skills. If it is to be understood as an excellence of communicating at least certain aspects of one's perspective out of a concern to benefit or at least not harm others epistemically, skills of this sort would seem to be required. Thus, here again, it may be that we arrive on an improved understanding of intellectual honesty if we clarify that intellectual honesty does include skills of self-knowledge and self-disclosure, like intellectual transparency does.
This leaves us with two remaining potential differences. Intellectual transparency was observed to be more positive than intellectual honesty, and it was observed to be concerned with promoting a broader array of epistemic goods for others than intellectual honesty was concerned with via the sharing of a broader range of aspects of one's perspective. These differences, notably, are closely related. It may be that it is just when we are in a position to make a determinative difference for whether someone has a false belief or a true belief that the duty to share our perspective with them is triggered. It may be that it is under just such circumstances, particularly as the importance of whether they have true or false beliefs on the matter rises, that it is appropriate to talk of them having a right that we share our perspective with them (on epistemic rights, see Watson Reference Watson2021). Yet, to be in a situation where we can make a determinative difference of this sort, it may typically be that we either know the target proposition whose truth or falsity the other person is wondering about, or their knowing that we are ignorant of it would provide adequate evidence to conclude that it is false. So, it may be that in just those circumstances where intellectual honesty is applicable, it is typically the case that what one needs to share is that one has or doesn't have a belief, and what one aims for in doing so is to ensure that the other person has a belief that is true by one's lights or avoids a belief that is false by one's lights.
Putting the point contrapositively may help. It may be that, at least typically, when we can enhance the epistemic value of a person's perspective in ways other than by leading them to have a belief that is true by our lights or leading them to avoid having a belief that is false by our lights, our doing so is not a matter of duty but is supererogatory. It may be, in other words, that when intellectual transparency is manifested in one of the ways noted in section 2.4 where it involves sharing non-doxastic aspects of one's perspective and influencing non-doxastic epistemic goods of others, that acting in these ways goes beyond the call of duty. Thus, it may be that intellectual transparency's being more positive than intellectual honesty and it's being concerned with a broader array of epistemic goods than intellectual honesty are two sides of the same coin. It may be that it is because intellectual transparency embraces a broader concern for others’ epistemic goods that it involves more positivity than intellectual honesty.
This leads us, finally, to the question of whether intellectual honesty should be understood to differ in this respect from intellectual transparency. Should intellectual honesty be understood to only embrace a narrower concern for others’ epistemic goods? Here I think we may find a fair amount of disagreement among virtue epistemologists. A guiding question that can help to clarify this disagreement is the following. Would a person who is motivated not only to do their epistemic duty with respect to sharing their perspective with others, but to go beyond the call of duty and share the varied aspects of their perspective with others when they can promote others’ epistemic well-being in a supererogatory way count as being more intellectually honest? Certainly we might think that an affirmative answer would fit with how we sometimes speak of a person being “very honest” with others, sharing aspects of their perspective that they didn't have to as a matter of duty. Yet, I suspect that there may be disagreement about the answer to this question among virtue epistemologists. Other virtue epistemologists may think that to go beyond the call of duty in this way is to exhibit a separate virtue, as we saw above in the discussion of “frankness”.
Respecting this potential disagreement, I want to offer a disjunctive conclusion. Either the answer to the guiding question is “yes”, and so the intellectually transparent person can be thought of as being very intellectually honest, or the answer is “no” and intellectual transparency can be thought of as a separate virtue from intellectual honesty. On the first option, intellectual transparency can be thought of as an exceptional form of intellectual honesty. The person who is intellectually transparent is very strongly intellectually honest. Perhaps we would even say they are ideally intellectually honest. Virtue epistemologists tend to think that intellectual virtues come in degrees. Intellectual transparency is, on this first option, a very high degree of intellectual honesty.
What about the second option? Here intellectual transparency and intellectual honesty are distinct virtues. Yet, they are also very similar. They operate in the same sphere of human activity – communicating aspects of one's perspective to promote or avoid injuring others’ epistemic goods. It's just that intellectual transparency embraces a concern for a wider variety of others’ epistemic goods and as a consequence involves a tendency to share more of one's perspective with others. The intellectually transparent person isn't motivated just to respect others’ epistemic rights or to avoid wronging others epistemically or to avoid deceiving others in the way they represent their views, for instance. Rather, they are motivated to share the varied aspects of their perspective out of a wholistic concern for others’ epistemic well-being.
This difference points to a way we might understand the precise relationship between intellectual honesty and intellectual transparency. Following Daniel Russell (Reference Russell2009), we might say that the reasons of intellectual honesty “ascend” to the reasons of intellectual transparency. That is, if a person who was both intellectually honest and intellectually transparent were asked why they thought that the reasons that motivate their honest conduct were reasons in the first place, they would probably appropriately respond by citing the reason that is characteristic of intellectual transparency. We have seen several proposals peppered throughout this paper for how we might conceptualize the reasons that are characteristic of intellectual honesty. The intellectually honest person is disposed to refrain from misrepresenting their perspective and to represent it faithfully out of motivations to, for example, avoid deceiving others, or avoid wronging others epistemically, or avoid violating others’ rights to access their perspective. Yet, each of these motivations are plausibly reasons in the first place because acting in accordance with them advances the broader aim of caring for others’ epistemic well-being via sharing one's perspective – the motivation distinctive of intellectual transparency. They are each more specific, limited instances of caring for another's epistemic well-being. Accordingly, following Russell's approach to understanding the cardinality of virtues, intellectual transparency will be a more cardinal virtue than intellectual honesty. Intellectual honesty may be conceptualized as intellectual transparency narrowed to particular contexts in which misrepresenting one's perspective or failing to share it faithfully would involve deceiving others, or wronging others epistemically, or violating others’ epistemic rights – depending on which of these or related suggestions ultimately provides the best account of intellectual honesty.Footnote 4 Intellectual honesty, then, would be a narrower, uniquely specified version of the more cardinal virtue of intellectual transparency in much the way that magnificence, for Russell, is a narrower, uniquely specified version of the more cardinal virtue of generosity.
While this proposal is both flexible and attractive, there is at least one important objection to it. Intellectual honesty, as understood by Miller and King, involves a concern not to deceive oneself. Indeed, for Miller, intellectual honesty is purely self-oriented in this way. Thus, intellectual honesty incorporates a motivation to promote or not harm one's own epistemic position, and not just that of others. In contrast, as Byerly conceives of it, intellectual transparency is exclusively oriented toward promoting others’ epistemic goods. In this respect, then, it would seem that the reasons characteristic of intellectual honesty cannot ascend to the reasons characteristic of intellectual transparency. Insofar as intellectual honesty is appropriately conceptualized of as involving self-oriented concerns pertaining to the possessor's own epistemic goods, it cannot be relatively less cardinal than intellectual transparency.
I think there are two reasonable responses to this concern that would allow intellectual transparency to remain more cardinal than intellectual honesty. First, it may be that Byerly's preferred approach is incorrect when it comes to intellectual transparency. Just like intellectual honesty, we should acknowledge that a person can be more or less transparent toward themselves. The idea that people can be more or less honest with themselves is typically understood by analogy with how they can be more or less honest with others. To the extent that such a proposal is plausible for honesty, it seems that a similar proposal may be attractive when it comes to intellectual transparency.
On the other hand – and this is the second response – it might seem that neither intellectual honesty nor intellectual transparency are best regarded as including self-oriented tendencies and concerns. In support of this way of thinking, it is tempting to think that the kinds of failures associated with a lack of self-oriented intellectual honesty, such as those involved in self-deception, are failures that would be corrected for by virtues other than intellectual honesty or intellectual transparency. King inadvertently suggests just this when he considers self-deception. After explaining several ways that self-deception might work, he mentions two intellectual virtues that might help correct for it – intellectual humility and intellectual vigilance (2021: 140). Other authors (e.g., Roberts and West Reference Roberts and West2015) have written at greater length about these virtues and the ways they can mitigate against the relevant kinds of self-deception. Thus, another viable approach to defending the proposed cardinality relationship between intellectual honesty and intellectual transparency is to propose that both virtues are best understood as other-regarding intellectual virtues (cf. Byerly Reference Byerly2021: 48–50). When combined with the previous response, it would seem that one way or another it is a plausible view that intellectual transparency is a more cardinal virtue than intellectual honesty, if the two are distinct virtues.
4. Conclusion
This paper has examined four potential differences between intellectual transparency and intellectual honesty, being guided by the conceptualizations of these traits found in Byerly (Reference Byerly2021), King (Reference King2021) and Miller (Reference Miller2021). We have seen that intellectual transparency, as conceptualized by Byerly, appears to be more epistemically focused, more positive, more skilful, and concerned with a broader array of epistemic goods than intellectual honesty or honesty are as understood by King and Miller. We've also questioned whether Miller's and King's accounts should ultimately be clarified or modified so that honesty doesn't end up differing from intellectual transparency in these ways. I argued that this is plausible with respect to two of the differences – those pertaining to epistemic versus semantic focus and those pertaining to skill. However, I've suggested that many virtue epistemologists may continue to think that there is a difference between intellectual transparency and intellectual honesty when it comes to their positivity and the range of epistemic goods with which they are concerned. I have proposed a guiding question that may help virtue epistemologists think about the relationship between these traits given this picture: does being intellectually transparent make one more intellectually honest? If a positive answer is given, then it appears that intellectual transparency is an exceptional or ideal version of intellectual honesty. If a negative answer is given, then, arguably, intellectual transparency is a more cardinal virtue than intellectual honesty.Footnote 5
