Open-Mindedness

Knowledge in other hands

An imagined contribution

Your open craft guide explains every step through diagrams. A contributor suggests an audio version. You hear “less elegant” before they have finished. Then you try a short consensual experiment: turn the diagram over and follow their spoken instructions for a paper model. The model stands. Your design principles remain; one of them has acquired a new example.

Giving an approach a fair hearing can mean asking for its purpose, trying a small example or examining the reasons offered. It does not mean accepting every proposal or treating every claim as equally supported. The willingness matters because an author’s first reaction can mistake difference from their design for a defect.

Open-Mindedness: finding the balance

The test is whether the approach serves a real need, not whether it is familiar or novel. A fair trial may lead to adoption, revision or a reasoned refusal.

Open-Mindedness gives…

Open-Mindedness expands the project’s capacity to learn from its users. Contributors can bring relevant experience without first translating every idea into the maintainer’s preferred form.

What Open-Mindedness makes possible

Formats can complement each other. A spoken sequence may reveal an ambiguity in a diagram, while a diagram may clarify a relation difficult to describe aloud. The resulting guide can serve more people and teach its authors something.

Open-Mindedness in ordinary life

A different workflow

Ask a contributor to explain the problem their method solves before insisting on the familiar sequence.

An unfamiliar vocabulary

Clarify what a term means in the speaker’s use before rejecting the thought behind it.

Nearby virtues, different work

Humility

Humility recognizes limits in your own understanding. Open-Mindedness gives an unfamiliar possibility a chance to inform it.

Discernment

Discernment evaluates what the trial or argument actually establishes.

Open-Mindedness and its counterfeits

Novelty worship lets unfamiliarity itself become a recommendation.

Endless consideration can postpone a decision long after the relevant reasons have been heard.

How to cultivate Open-Mindedness

• Ask what need the proposed approach answers.
• State its strongest relevant reason before evaluating it.
• Try a small reversible comparison where it is welcome and appropriate.

Try it today

For a harmless instruction you know, imagine an alternative format: a diagram, short spoken explanation or ordered list. Describe one reader need it might serve and one point that would need checking.

Access needs vary. Do not simulate or claim to understand a disability from a brief format exercise, and do not make another person demonstrate a limitation to earn consideration.

Questions worth returning to

• What purpose might this approach serve that mine misses?
• Have I heard the reason, or only recognized the difference?

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. On my return from the voyage of the “Beagle”, I explained to him my views on coral-reefs, which differed from his, and I was greatly surprised and encouraged by the vivid interest which he showed.

   Charles Darwin · The Autobiography of Charles Darwin
   FROM MY MARRIAGE, JANUARY 29, 1839, AND RESIDENCE IN UPPER GOWER STREET, TO OUR LEAVING LONDON AND SETTLING AT DOWN, SEPTEMBER 14, 1842.
   Charles Darwin · Francis Darwin’s edited text from The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887); PG #2010; not the later unexpurgated edition

   Darwin recalls Lyell’s interest in coral-reef views different from his own. Interest in an unfamiliar account can encourage inquiry without requiring instant agreement.

2. Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason?

   John Milton · Areopagitica
   A SPEECH FOR THE LIBERTY OF UNLICENSED PRINTING TO THE PARLIAMENT OF ENGLAND
   John Milton · 1644 work in PG #608 transcription; underlying print edition not specified

   Milton argues for examining error through reading and reasoning. The theological framework is his; the catalog uses the value of a fair hearing without endorsing every claim or his exclusions.

3. We sit around the council table not blank pages but made up of all our past experiences.

   Mary Parker Follett · The New State
   VI THE UNITY OF THE SOCIAL PROCESS
   Mary Parker Follett · Longmans, Green and Co., 1918; PG #73755

   Follett observes that participants bring experience rather than arriving as blank pages. An unfamiliar proposal may carry knowledge absent from the original design.

4. Her words puzzled me very much because I did not then understand anything unless I touched it.

   Helen Keller · The Story of My Life
   CHAPTER VI
   Helen Keller · Special Edition with additional chapters; edited with supplementary material by John Albert Macy; PG #2397; print date not specified in capture

   Keller describes a particular stage in learning when words without tactile reference were puzzling. The example makes differences in access to an explanation visible; it is not a universal account of deafblind learning.

5. To become respectable, the exercise of their understanding is necessary, there is no other foundation for independence of character; I mean explicitly to say, that they must only bow to the authority of reason, instead of being the MODEST slaves of opinion.

   Mary Wollstonecraft · A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
   CHAPTER 3. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED.
   Mary Wollstonecraft · 1792 work in PG #3420 transcription; underlying print edition not specified; anonymous biographical sketch excluded

   Wollstonecraft argues for women’s intellectual independence instead of submission to opinion. A fair hearing enables another person’s reasons to matter, rather than requiring agreement with established taste.

6. The greatest difficulty is experienced when the two standards come sharply together, and when both sides make an attempt at understanding and explanation.

   Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics
   CHAPTER II, CHARITABLE EFFORT
   Jane Addams · Macmillan, 1902; captured PG #15487, reprints June and September 1902 named in front matter

   Addams examines the meeting of different ethical standards in charitable relations. Difficulty in understanding is a reason for careful explanation, not immediate dismissal.

7. I was anxious to support the principles which I have advocated by the observations of others, and in this respect I found myself peculiarly fortunate.

   Charles Babbage · On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures
   Preface
   Charles Babbage · 1832 text with Preface to the Second Edition; PG #4238; underlying print imprint not fully specified in transcription

   Babbage seeks observations from other people to support the principles he discusses. A design can be strengthened by evidence that does not originate with its author.

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