Too little
Refusing the rival reading
“You must be looking at it incorrectly.”
Your initial interpretation becomes a condition for entering the discussion.
Open-Mindedness
Let an unfamiliar explanation earn a fair hearing.
Readiness to give unfamiliar reasons or perspectives a fair hearing.
Open-Mindedness makes your understanding available to alternatives. In science, that means allowing another account to become clear enough to examine, even when your first reading feels obvious. The hearing leads toward judgment; it need not end in agreement.
Open-Mindedness gives another way into the problem
You see a hill. Your colleague sees a hollow. The little relief model has not changed, but the two of you are reading its shadows differently. You turn it and ask your colleague to move the light. An argument about who can see properly becomes a shared question about what each view reveals.
Finding the balance in Open-Mindedness
Two observers disagree about the shape suggested by shadows on a small model.
A fitting response
Trying the other viewpoint
“Show me what makes it look hollow to you.”
You give the alternative enough attention to discover how it can be examined.
Pursued too far
Keeping every account forever
“We must never prefer one interpretation; that would close our minds.”
Hospitality to alternatives becomes avoidance of the judgment the inquiry needs.
A view earns consideration before it earns confidence. Keeping those stages distinct makes both openness and judgment possible.
What Open-Mindedness makes possible
An alternative can reveal an assumption you did not know you were making. Even when you ultimately reject it, understanding why it seemed plausible can improve the question or the demonstration. Shared inquiry becomes less dependent on everyone seeing the same thing immediately.
Open-Mindedness in ordinary life
A junior colleague’s method
The group has dismissed a junior colleague’s approach as unfamiliar. Ask what it reveals and agree on a relevant comparison with the established method. Give the proposal enough attention to judge its merits rather than its author’s rank.
A surprising reading
Try to state an author’s argument in terms they would recognize before writing your objection.
Nearby virtues, different work
Fairness
Fairness applies consistent standards to the competing views; Open-Mindedness lets a neglected view enter the comparison.
Intellectual Honesty
Intellectual Honesty revises belief when the evidence warrants it. Open-Mindedness creates the opportunity to encounter that evidence.
Open-Mindedness and its counterfeits
Counterfeit Open-Mindedness: agreeable indifference
Saying “all interpretations are equally good” can avoid the work of understanding any of them. Genuine openness takes the alternative seriously enough to examine it.
How to cultivate Open-Mindedness
Ask for the observation that makes the alternative plausible.
Restate the rival account before evaluating it.
Specify what would justify preferring one explanation.
Try it today
Choose a modest disagreement about an idea. Write the strongest version of the other account you can support, then identify a question that would help compare it with yours.
Questions worth returning to
- What assumption makes my interpretation feel obvious?
- Have I understood the alternative, or only its weakest version?
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
Not so my mother, who was ever ready to hail joyfully any new idea or theory, and to give it honest attention, even if it were at variance with her former convictions.
Martha Somerville · Personal Recollections · Chapter I, Martha Somerville’s introduction
Martha Somerville describes her mother’s willingness to consider new theories late in life. Past achievement did not require treating her earlier views as a finished boundary.
A matter of opinion derives weight from the name which is attached to it; but a chain of reasoning is equally conclusive, whoever may be its author.
Charles Babbage · Reflections on the Decline of Science in England · Preface
Babbage separates the force of an argument from the standing of its author. A junior colleague’s method deserves examination on its merits, with the same checks applied to a senior colleague’s proposal.
… all we require is, that he will hold them without bigotry, retain till he shall see reason to question them, and be ready to resign them when fairly proved untenable, and to doubt them when the weight of probability is shown to lie against them.
John F. W. Herschel · Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy · § 70
Herschel does not demand immediate abandonment of every prior belief. He asks for a willingness to let reasons alter both confidence and commitment.
The only thing out of place in the discussion is dogmatism on either side.
John Tyndall · Fragments of Science · Vol. II, VIII. Scientific Use Of The Imagination.
Tyndall is defending a reasoned hearing for an evolutionary hypothesis. He asks both supporters and opponents to keep their claims answerable to inquiry.
… cultivation of a variety of alternative suggestions is an important factor in good thinking.
John Dewey · How We Think · Chapter Six
Dewey places this phrase in an account of rival conjectures and suspended belief. A second reading of the relief is useful because it suggests an observation that the first reading alone might miss.
Who settles the way?
Maria Mitchell · Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals · Chapter IX
Mitchell challenges inherited rules about how women may think and work. The brief question exposes authority that has been accepted without examination.
Every one carries in his mind his own conception of the world, of which he can not so easily rid himself.
Poincaré questions the possibility of approaching an experiment without any prior ideas. Openness begins by making those ideas available for examination, including the assumptions built into familiar descriptions.
Continue through the catalog
Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.