Epistemic Humility Across Difference

Despite her extraordinary learning, Sor Juana recognized knowledge held by servants, indigenous peoples, and others excluded from formal education—a radical epistemological stance. Epistemic humility is not self-deprecation but honest assessment: what I have not studied, what I cannot know from my position, whose expertise I systematically overlook because of my privilege. This becomes especially crucial for those with educational advantage, whose credentials can create false confidence in the scope of their understanding. The practice involves actively seeking knowledge sources outside one's native institutions: oral traditions, embodied wisdom, community expertise, lived experience. In privileged institutions, this means deliberate work to center voices systematically marginalized from authority. For Sor Juana, it meant writing about indigenous knowledge and questioning whether European frameworks exhausted possible truth. Contemporary application requires acknowledging that degrees and publications are particular forms of legitimated knowledge—valuable but not exhaustive. Those with epistemic privilege bear responsibility to make space for other ways of knowing and to admit the boundaries of their own expertise shaped by their particular position.