Too little
Defending the identity
“The pilot must be wrong; this is the policy I stand for.”
Personal commitment becomes a shield against relevant evidence.
Intellectual Honesty
Let evidence defeat a policy belief even when defending it has become part of your public identity.
Readiness to let evidence correct a preferred belief.
Intellectual Honesty lets evidence correct a preferred belief. In stewardship, the difficult belief may be one you publicly championed and worked hard to implement. Sincere effort and personal investment do not establish that it worked. The disposition requires examining the result with the same seriousness you wanted others to give the proposal.
Intellectual Honesty gives a policy belief that remains answerable to experience
You campaigned for the council on a single central collection point that would end missed pickups. Now the pilot diary shows that some residents miss its narrower collection window. Your campaign mug still says ONE STOP SOLVES IT. At the public review, you explain which prediction failed and recommend keeping the workable location while testing a wider window before expansion. You also say what evidence would justify that next step. The mug can remain in service without being put in charge of the policy.
Finding the balance in Intellectual Honesty
A councillor must revise a flagship proposal when its pilot contradicts the claim they publicly campaigned on.
A fitting response
A revisable belief
“Which assumption failed, and what does the result support instead?”
The useful parts and limits of the proposal can be distinguished.
Pursued too far
Conversion by novelty
“One surprising report means every earlier conclusion should be reversed.”
Willingness to change is confused with abandoning standards of evidence.
An unusual week may not represent the service. Check that possibility without using it as an automatic excuse to dismiss every unfavorable result.
What Intellectual Honesty makes possible
Public learning becomes possible when a pilot can alter the plan rather than merely advertise it. A clear account of what changed helps others evaluate the next proposal. It also frees a person to contribute through revision instead of spending all their effort defending the first version.
Intellectual Honesty in ordinary life
A favored explanation
Write down what evidence would count against your explanation before looking for more support.
A trial arrangement
Compare the trial with the purpose you originally stated, not with a new purpose invented after the results.
Nearby virtues, different work
Integrity
Integrity carries considered ethical commitments into action. Intellectual Honesty keeps factual beliefs open to correction.
Humility
Humility recognizes limits in one’s knowledge; Intellectual Honesty responds when evidence bears against a preferred conclusion.
Intellectual Honesty and its counterfeits
The moving target
Changing the test of success after an unfavorable result counterfeits Intellectual Honesty. Explain any legitimate change of purpose instead of silently rewriting the original one.
Fashionable reversal
Adopting the newest claim to seem open-minded is a counterfeit of Intellectual Honesty. A changed belief still needs a defensible basis.
How to cultivate Intellectual Honesty
Keep the original prediction beside the actual result.
Seek the strongest plausible explanation of an unfavorable finding.
State both what changed and what remains supported.
Try it today
Review one small prediction you made. Write a sentence that separates the result from your wish about it.
Questions worth returning to
- Am I testing the proposal or protecting my association with it?
- What would make this contrary evidence more or less persuasive?
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
When the desire to prevail is once keenly upon us, we behave very differently than when our object is the seeking of truth.
Follett follows this with a legislator hiding a weakness in a favored bill. The same motive can make a pilot become a test of loyalty instead of a test of the proposal.
This dread of the categorical proposition might be creditable, if it sprang from attachment to a very high standard of evidence, or from a deep sense of the relative and provisional quality of truth.
John Morley · On Compromise · Chapter I
Morley contrasts evidential caution with deference to the existing order. The pilot should be judged by what its evidence can support, including a definite adverse result, rather than by whether uncertainty protects the original proposal.
I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them; but, holding it a sound maxim that it is better only to be sometimes right than at all times wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous I shall be ready to renounce them.
In an early electoral address, Lincoln makes revisability part of his public position. A campaign association need not commit its advocate to defending an opinion after the evidence defeats it.
Is there a doubt, whether a common government can embrace so large a sphere? Let experience solve it.
George Washington · Farewell Address · 17 September 1796, testing the Union
Washington argues for giving the Union a fair trial and testing an objection through experience. His confidence in that outcome is clear in the surrounding paragraph; the useful method is to let the trial bear on the disputed belief.
To point to the achievement of the past as a guarantee for continuing what has since become shocking to us is stupid business; it is to forget that progress itself depends upon adaptation, upon a nice balance between continuity and change.
Jane Addams · Newer Ideals of Peace · Chapter VIII
Addams is reconsidering the inherited prestige of war. Her argument challenges the inference from past achievement to present justification; a proposal’s earlier reputation likewise cannot settle what the current pilot shows.
On the morning of the day of our meeting, however, she telephoned that she could not come, as she had just read the bill, thinking it would be wise to do so before she publicly opposed it, and she found she agreed with it heartily!
Follett recounts a prospective guest who changed her view after reading the bill she intended to oppose. The comic reversal favors examining the proposal itself before defending the position one arrived with.
There were four things from which the Master was entirely free. He had no foregone conclusions, no arbitrary predeterminations, no obstinacy, and no egoism.
The Analects (on Confucius) · The Analects · Book IX, chapter IV · Translated by James Legge
The compilers describe Confucius through the conclusions and personal attachments he could relinquish. The councillor’s task is to keep the campaign identity from deciding in advance what the pilot is allowed to show.
Continue through the catalog
Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.