Reference reading
Arrogance
Treating one’s importance or certainty as a reason not to examine a correction.
An inflated sense of one's importance or judgment that discounts correction and other people's standing.
Imagine this: A person insists they know how to assemble a flat-pack shelf. The spare leg in their hand is blamed on the instructions.
How the pattern works
Experience can be relevant to assembling furniture. It does not make the spare leg disappear. Arrogance allows an estimate of one’s own judgment to substitute for attention to the particular evidence now available. The correction is rejected partly because accepting it would place the supposedly less knowledgeable person in the right.
In domestic life, certainty can become a form of rank: I know the route, remember the agreement or understand the machine, so your observation need not be checked. Someone may then have to challenge both an incorrect answer and the speaker’s presumed entitlement to supply it.
What it costs a shared life
An easily corrected mistake can acquire a personal audience and a longer life. Other people may stop offering observations, leaving the confident person less informed while preserving the appearance of agreement. The household pays for certainty with time, avoidable repairs or unnecessary conflict.
A distinction worth keeping
Confidence, expertise and rejecting a weak objection are not Arrogance by themselves. The issue is whether judgment remains responsive to reasons. Vanity depends excessively on admiration; Arrogance can reject a correction even without anyone to impress. Contempt concerns the standing denied to another person.
What a useful response can change
Examine the observation before defending the identity attached to the answer. What would the extra leg fit, and what does the assembly diagram actually show?
Acknowledge a useful correction in proportion to it. A change of mind need not become a ceremony in which the corrected person remains the center of attention.
Keep competence answerable to particulars. Knowing many things does not remove the need to find out this thing.
Questions for reflection
- What observation have I rejected because of who supplied it?
- Can someone correct me without first reassuring me about my ability?
Other perspectives
The usefulness of an opinion is itself matter of opinion: as disputable, as open to discussion, and requiring discussion as much, as the opinion itself.
John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source
Mill argues that a claim of usefulness is itself open to examination. A claim of household expertise likewise cannot settle whether the particular correction is sound without considering its reasons.
for deciding all questions of literature and politics without troubling themselves with unnecessary reasons or arguments
Elizabeth Gaskell · Cranford · Read the source
Gaskell’s narrator affectionately satirizes the self-sufficiency of Cranford’s judgments. The irony exposes certainty that dispenses with reasons, rather than endorsing the community’s assumption that further argument is unnecessary.