Too little
Omit the awkward test
Nobody will use an empty list. I will leave that result out.
The demonstration looks sound because evidence against the claim has disappeared.
Intellectual Honesty
Keep the result that makes you revise the theory.
Readiness to let evidence correct a preferred belief.
Intellectual Honesty keeps an explanation answerable to evidence, including the result you would rather not have found. The virtue is in giving that result its proper weight and revising your claim. Technical skill can help repair the script; honesty determines whether the inconvenient case stays in the account.
Intellectual Honesty gives beliefs that can learn from a test
Your little script adds the scores correctly in every example you chose. Then you try an empty list, and it awards a point to absolutely nobody. You almost leave that case out of the project notes: it makes an otherwise tidy demonstration look awkward. Instead you keep it, narrow your claim and work out what must change. The invisible winner has done the project a useful favor.
Finding the balance in Intellectual Honesty
Keep a failed empty-list test visible when it contradicts your claim that a hobby script always totals correctly.
A fitting response
Keep the counterexample
It works for these lists, but the empty case is wrong. I will keep that test.
The result changes the account before any repair is presented as complete.
Pursued too far
Dismiss the whole project
One failure means none of the results can teach me anything.
A particular error becomes a verdict that exceeds the evidence.
Confidence becomes dependable when the test is allowed to change it. A troublesome result deserves a place in the account you share.
What Intellectual Honesty makes possible
A failed example can become a durable piece of understanding. You learn where your claim stops being true, and anyone trying the project can see that boundary. A smaller accurate claim is more useful than an impressive claim protected from testing.
Intellectual Honesty in ordinary life
A game theory
Keep the match that contradicts your preferred explanation of a strategy. Ask what difference it reveals.
A collection rule
A specimen with two patterns belongs in the evidence even if it spoils your neat groups.
Nearby virtues, different work
Honesty
Honesty represents what you know truthfully; Intellectual Honesty also governs how you form and revise the belief.
Humility
Humility accepts fallibility; Intellectual Honesty acts on particular evidence of error.
Intellectual Honesty and its counterfeits
Selective skepticism
Demanding exact proof only from the view you dislike counterfeits Intellectual Honesty. Apply comparable standards to your preferred claim.
Automatic reversal
A surprising objection deserves examination, not an immediate announcement that everything you believed was false.
How to cultivate Intellectual Honesty
State what evidence would change the claim.
Keep inconvenient observations in the same record as supporting ones.
Revise the wording in proportion to what the new evidence establishes.
Try it today
Take a modest claim about a hobby project. Try one case that could challenge it, then record whether the claim or your method needs to change.
Questions worth returning to
- Am I applying the same standard to both explanations?
- What exactly changes, and what still has support?
Keep the practice proportionate
Use an ordinary hobby claim for practice. You do not need to announce every uncertainty publicly or debate a hostile audience.
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it.
Charles Darwin · The Autobiography of Charles Darwin · Written May 1, 1881
Darwin makes a beloved hypothesis answerable to contrary facts. Keeping the empty-list failure visible gives the claim about the script the same opportunity to change.
The idea is accepted as a working hypothesis, as something to guide investigation and bring to light new facts, not as a final conclusion.
John Dewey · How We Think · Systematic Inference: Induction and Deduction
Dewey treats a working hypothesis as a guide for finding more facts. The claim that the script totals correctly can guide tests while remaining open to their results.
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 · What Is Thought?
Reflection seeks evidence that might overturn a suggestion as well as support it. An empty input tests the script beyond the examples chosen to make the demonstration succeed.
Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.
John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Chapter II, Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion
Mill makes openness to refutation a condition of warranted confidence. Applied to a hobby claim, it means keeping objections available rather than protecting a favored conclusion from examination.
Truth, thus held, is but one superstition the more, accidentally clinging to the words which enunciate a truth.
John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Chapter II, Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion
The surrounding passage concerns a true belief held without understanding its reasons. Getting the answer right by allegiance is different from holding it in a way evidence can correct.
So when a rule is established we should first seek the cases where this rule has the greatest chance of failing.
Poincaré directs inquiry toward the cases where a rule could fail. The unexpected point awarded to nobody becomes useful evidence once it stays in the project notes.
We see at once how imprudent it would be to draw conclusions from an isolated case in which rational coordination or premeditated intention might appear to intervene.
An isolated behavior can tempt the observer into a larger explanation than the evidence warrants. Keeping the inference proportionate is part of being answerable to observations.
Continue through the catalog
Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.