Open-Mindedness

Meeting the unfamiliar

An invented encounter

You arrange three events in a straight line. The response arrives as a ring. You flatten it back into a line and receive another ring. Eventually you try following the circle: the last event changes the meaning of the first. Your diagram has been an excellent ruler and a rather poor listener.

Open-Mindedness lets an alternative account become intelligible before you judge it. You temporarily follow its distinctions, ask what they explain and look for the point where your first scheme missed something. The process can deepen your original view or change it. Either result rests on firmer grounds when you have actually heard the alternative instead of translating it into a weak version of your own. Here the revision is from a sequence of separate events to a cycle in which an ending can alter a beginning. Giving the ring a hearing matters because it changes the category you use to understand it.

Open-Mindedness: finding the balance

A fair hearing gives a claim consideration, not automatic authority. You can finish understanding an argument and still find its evidence inadequate.

Open-Mindedness gives…

Open-Mindedness gives disagreement something substantial to be about. You can compare two accounts once each has been understood on its own terms.

What Open-Mindedness makes possible

An unfamiliar arrangement can suggest a question your usual categories conceal. Taking it seriously may expand what you notice even when you ultimately reject its conclusion.

Open-Mindedness in ordinary life

A different explanation

Ask a willing interlocutor which distinction matters most in their account, then use it accurately.

A book you disagree with

Find the strongest version of one argument before deciding where it fails.

Nearby virtues, different work

Curiosity

Curiosity seeks an answer. Open-Mindedness gives an offered answer room to be understood.

Tolerance

Tolerance permits a harmless difference. Open-Mindedness considers what its explanation might teach you.

Open-Mindedness and its counterfeits

Novelty worship counterfeits Open-Mindedness when strangeness itself becomes evidence of truth. Open-Mindedness can learn from an unfamiliar account while asking the same serious questions it would ask of a familiar one.

How to cultivate Open-Mindedness

• State the strongest version of an alternative before naming your objection.
• Notice when a category makes a question impossible to ask, and try a different description.

Try it today

Choose a short argument on a familiar topic. Summarize the reason its author finds persuasive, then identify what you would need to assess it. You can keep your original view.

A fair hearing can happen through reading. It does not require exposing yourself to harassment, accepting false claims or continuing an unwanted conversation.

Questions worth returning to

• Could the author recognize their argument in my summary?
• What did the alternative make visible?

Keep the practice proportionate

These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Seven readings, one for each day. All remain available here. Historical arguments and fictional dialogue are identified in their source notes.

1. There may even be a very great number of natural senses, but in the distribution of them among the planets, only five have fallen to our share, and with these five we remain satisfied because we don't know of any more.

   Bernard de Fontenelle · Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds
   Third Evening, p. 78
   The narrator, a character in the dialogue · Elizabeth Gunning translation, 1803 edition

   The narrator imagines senses unavailable to us. The value here is a challenge to taking familiar categories as exhaustive, not an empirical claim about senses or other planets. His speculative certainty elsewhere is not adopted.

2. Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands.

   William James · Talks to Teachers on Psychology; and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals
   On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings, conclusion
   William James · , 1899

   Partial viewpoints explain why a received circular account deserves examination. The source does not require accepting incompatible claims as equally true.

3. To turn the thing over in mind, to reflect, means to hunt for additional evidence, for new data, that will develop the suggestion, and will either, as we say, bear it out or else make obvious its absurdity and irrelevance.

   John Dewey · How We Think
   Chapter I, Summary
   John Dewey · , 1910

   Trying an alternative account includes looking for evidence that could defeat it. This guards the circular-diagram scene against confusing openness with unconditional assent.

4. He was very anxious to have more detailed information of what he called this extraordinary state of affairs, for from the solidity of the earth there had always been a disposition to regard it as uninhabitable.

   H. G. Wells · The First Men in the Moon
   Chapter XXV, The Grand Lunar
   Cavor, in Bedford's fictional account · , 1901

   The lunar observer's mistaken view reverses the human assumption that familiar conditions define habitability. This is a literary reversal, not a scientific statement about either world.

5. To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty.

   John Stuart Mill · On Liberty
   Chapter II
   John Stuart Mill · captured Walter Scott edition with W. L. Courtney introduction

   The case for hearing a challenge supports examining the circular account. This philosophical claim does not require granting every claim equal credibility or unlimited attention.

6. To the open mind, nature and social experience are full of varied and subtle challenges to look further.

   John Dewey · How We Think
   Chapter III, Curiosity
   John Dewey · , 1910

   Dewey describes curiosity sustained beyond asking someone else for an answer. The circular diagram similarly earns examination before dismissal.

7. I affirm nothing, and am contented to believe that many more things are possible than are usually thought so.

   Voltaire · Micromegas, in Voltaire’s Romances
   Micromegas, VI, What Happened in Their Intercourse with Men
   An unnamed follower of Locke, a character in the dialogue · Peter Eckler, New York, 1889; translator not identified in the captured title matter
   French original; English translator unidentified in the 1889 Eckler edition

   A follower of Locke speaks during the philosophers’ disagreement about mind and matter. His refusal to close the question contrasts with their confident systems. Possibility opens inquiry here; it does not give every proposed account equal support.

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