Reference reading
Stubbornness
Protecting a view or method from the reasons that should lead one to reconsider it.
Habitual unwillingness to revise a view or method when relevant reasons call for reconsideration.
Imagine this: A tall guest is offered the household’s usual tiny stool. The host brings a measuring tape to explain why the guest should fit the tradition.
How the pattern works
A familiar arrangement may have worked well for years. That history does not answer whether it fits the person now present. Stubbornness becomes revealing when the method is protected by redefining every new circumstance as a failure to cooperate with it.
The canonical identity is Rigidity: unwillingness to revise a view or method when relevant reasons call for reconsideration. A domestic habit can acquire the force of a principle without acquiring its justification. “We have always done it this way” then describes the repetition but does not defend it.
What it costs a shared life
People can spend more effort fitting themselves to the routine than the routine saves. A small accommodation becomes a dispute about loyalty, and new information arrives as an offense. The arrangement remains stable while its purpose becomes harder to fulfill.
A distinction worth keeping
Persistence in a defensible purpose, a consent boundary or a justified refusal is not Rigidity merely because someone dislikes it. Arrogance can reject correction through inflated judgment; Rigidity can defend a familiar method without claiming personal superiority. A change of means need not abandon the purpose.
What a useful response can change
State what the arrangement is meant to achieve. If seating is the purpose, a suitable chair may honor it better than preserving the exact stool.
Examine the relevant new circumstance rather than arguing about whether change is generally good. A particular accommodation need not become a permanent rule for every future occasion.
Keep justified boundaries explicit. Flexibility does not require making consent, safety or someone’s basic rights negotiable.
Questions for reflection
- What purpose is this method supposed to serve?
- Which new reason have I treated as an inconvenience instead of information?
Other perspectives
Waiving, however, this possibility—assuming that the true opinion abides in the mind, but abides as a prejudice, a belief independent of, and proof against, argument—this is not the way in which truth ought to be held by a rational being.
John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source
Mill distinguishes holding an opinion as a reasoned judgment from protecting it as a prejudice immune to argument. A household tradition needs the same distinction when circumstances no longer fit its method.
“It is particularly incumbent on those who never change their opinion, to be secure of judging properly at first.”
Jane Austen · Pride and Prejudice · Read the source
Elizabeth’s remark in Austen’s dialogue exposes the difficulty of promising never to change an opinion. The irony favors answerability to correction, not the equally unreasoned habit of changing one’s mind for novelty.