Too little
Protecting the account
“We can discuss that comparison after the presentation.”
An inconvenient result is postponed because it threatens the preferred interpretation.
Intellectual Honesty
Let the evidence change your preferred explanation.
Readiness to let evidence correct a preferred belief.
Intellectual Honesty brings your beliefs into contact with what you actually find. In inquiry, an explanation earns its place by answering to observations, including the ones you would rather had come out differently. Changing your mind can be an achievement of the investigation.
Intellectual Honesty gives an explanation room to improve
The diagram for tomorrow’s group meeting has your favorite explanation at its center. An independent comparison has just arrived, and it supports a different account. You have rehearsed the old explanation so often that revising the slide feels harder than revising the experiment. You keep the result on screen and move the arrow. The team now has something better to discuss than your confidence.
Finding the balance in Intellectual Honesty
A comparison challenges the explanation a research team was preparing to present.
A fitting response
Revising the interpretation
“The result stands. This comparison changes what we think explains it.”
You identify the belief that loses support and explain why, without discarding observations that remain useful.
Pursued too far
Overcorrecting
“Our favored explanation failed, so nothing we found matters.”
A sweeping reversal avoids the more exact work of deciding which claims actually change.
A result and its explanation have different jobs. Keeping the first stable can make a reasoned change to the second easier to follow.
What Intellectual Honesty makes possible
Intellectual Honesty lets a team invest in a question without becoming permanently invested in its first answer. A clear revision preserves the path from prediction to observation to judgment. Colleagues can examine the new interpretation and decide which comparison would move the inquiry forward. Work spent on the earlier account can remain useful even when its central claim changes.
Intellectual Honesty in ordinary life
Before the meeting
Keep the dated prediction beside the revised explanation so collaborators can see what the comparison taught you.
A strong alternative
Explain the rival account in terms its proponent would recognize, then say which observation changed your confidence.
Nearby virtues, different work
Honesty
Honesty preserves what you report. Intellectual Honesty also asks whether you let that report alter what you believe.
Open-Mindedness
Open-Mindedness gives an alternative a hearing; Intellectual Honesty follows through when its evidence deserves a change of view.
Intellectual Honesty and its counterfeits
Counterfeit Intellectual Honesty: the revised prediction
Quietly editing the earlier prediction makes the outcome look expected all along. A genuine revision preserves what you expected and names what changed.
How to cultivate Intellectual Honesty
Write down what an explanation leads you to expect.
Separate observations from the interpretation placed on them.
State a revision with its reason and its limits.
Try it today
Choose a modest explanation in your own notes. Compare it with an alternative and write what evidence would justify changing your confidence; preserve the earlier version.
Questions worth returning to
- Which belief changed, and which observation stayed the same?
- Could a colleague reconstruct why I changed my mind?
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
Indeed, I have had no choice but to act in this manner, for with the exception of the Coral Reefs, I cannot remember a single first-formed hypothesis which had not after a time to be given up or greatly modified.
Charles Darwin · The Autobiography of Charles Darwin · Written May 1, 1881
Darwin describes revision as a recurring part of his work. The first account is a place to begin, and its survival is not the measure of the investigation.
The first condition of success is patient industry, an honest receptivity, and a willingness to abandon all preconceived notions, however cherished, if they be found to contradict the truth.
John Tyndall · Fragments of Science · Vol. I, XI. On The Study Of Physics.
Tyndall places willingness to revise beside sustained effort. A group can have worked carefully on an explanation and still need to change it when the comparison comes back.
If small errors occur, it is said that they are too trifling to be of any importance. If larger errors are pointed out, it is immediately contended that they can deceive nobody, because of their magnitude.
Charles Babbage · Reflections on the Decline of Science in England · Chapter IV, Section 11
Babbage mocks two excuses that make correction impossible: the error is either too small or too obvious to matter. The question to ask is what the error changes in the claim.
… content ourselves with observing, as a plain matter of fact, what is.
John F. W. Herschel · Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy · § 68
Herschel contrasts what happens with preconceived expectations of what nature ought to do. The independent comparison must enter the explanation as it came back, even when it disrupts the team’s favored diagram.
When they do this, when they come to truth through their investigations, when doubt leads them to discovery, the truth which they get will be theirs, and their minds will work on and on unfettered.
Maria Mitchell · Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals · Chapter IX
Mitchell is urging women to investigate rather than defer to inherited authority. The finding gains its force from inquiry, not from who first declared it.
This proved error makes me doubt the other proposition, though logical, after all, and agreeing with the methods followed by a host of parasites.
Jean-Henri Fabre · The Wonders of Instinct · Chapter 14 · trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
Fabre lets a demonstrated error affect his confidence in a related account. An argument can remain plausible while losing the support he once gave it.
A series of observations continued for some years will give approximate values of the secular and periodic inequalities, which must be corrected from time to time, till theory and observation agree.
Mary Somerville · On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences · Section VIII.
Somerville describes successive correction in orbital work. The point here is the willingness to refine an account through observation, rather than treat its first numerical form as final.
Continue through the catalog
Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.