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My dissertation investigates the epistemic, moral, and political significance of open-mindedness. Its main goal is to argue that there is an imperfect duty of open-mindedness that sets moral and epistemic requirements on the structure of one's agency.The common understanding of open-mindedness describes it as a purely epistemic virtue consisting for an individual to be willing to expose oneself, horizontally, to different views, and to cognitively engage with them. I argue that this purely epistemic, intellectual, horizontal, and individual conception is incomplete in several respects. First, open-mindedness comprises also a vertical dimension, oriented not only towards the broadening of one's perspective, but also towards the deepening of one's understanding; second, when the subject matter involves other people, vertical open-mindedness has a distinctively moral value; third, open-mindedness towards other people has a practical, action-oriented dimension, which calls for practical engagement and cooperation; finally, open-mindedness can sometimes be articulated also at the collective level, through the creation of structures and procedures embodying forms of institutional open-mindedness and fostering in turn individual open-mindedness. The basic idea is that there is something wrong with our agency if, in our cognitive engagement with a subject matter, and/or in our practical engagement with other people, our agency and our mind are not appropriately open to that subject matter, or to those people. The duty of open-mindedness does not necessarily require one to do some specific thing, in a given circumstance. It is an imperfect duty in the Kantian sense - it prescribes structuring one's agency around certain values. My strategy to defend my view is twofold. First, I offer a general argument for what a duty of open-mindedness consists in and what its moral and epistemic grounds are. Second, I show that recognizing this duty would help us to better address specific problems in different areas of epistemology and moral philosophy. On the epistemic side, I argue that a duty of open-mindedness can help us give a fuller account of the requirements for well-formed beliefs, by appealing to the structure governing the direction of attention during inquiry. On the moral side, I argue that open-mindedness can help us explain our obligations to practically engage with people whom we are not related to yet, such as prospective co-workers and prospective co-citizens. This in turn provides further support for the idea that we should acknowledge a duty of open-mindedness and helps us spell out in more detail what open-mindedness consists in and its central role in the normative landscape.
When should you engage with difficult arguments against your cherished controversial beliefs? The primary conclusion of this book is that your obligations to engage with counterarguments are more limited than is often thought. In some standard situations, you shouldn't engage with difficult counterarguments and, if you do, you shouldn't engage with them open-mindedly. This conclusion runs counter to aspects of the Millian political tradition and political liberalism, as well as what people working in informal logic tend to say about argumentation. Not all misleading arguments wear their flaws on their sleeve. Each step of a misleading argument might seem compelling and you might not be able to figure out what's wrong with it. Still, even if you can't figure out what's wrong with an argument, you can know that it's misleading. One way to know that an argument is misleading is, counterintuitively, to lack expertise in the methods and evidence-types employed by the argument. When you know that a counterargument is misleading, you shouldn't engage with it open-mindedly and sometimes shouldn't engage with it at all. You shouldn't engage open-mindedly because you shouldn't be willing to reduce your confidence in response to arguments you know are misleading. And you sometimes shouldn't engage closed-mindedly, because to do so can be manipulative or ineffective. In making this case, Jeremy Fantl discusses echo chambers and group polarization, the importance in academic writing of a sympathetic case for the opposition, the epistemology of disagreement, the account of open-mindedness, and invitations to problematic academic speakers.
This book explores the epistemic side of racial and sexual oppression. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from listening to each other.
This collection of 19 chapters, all appearing in print here for the first time and written by an international team of established and emerging scholars, explores the place of intellectual virtues and vices in a social world. Relevant virtues include open-mindedness, curiosity, intellectual courage, diligence in inquiry, and the like. Relevant vices include dogmatism, need for immediate certainty, and gullibility and the like. The chapters are divided into four key sections: Foundational Issues; Individual Virtues; Collective Virtues; and Methods and Measurements. And the chapters explore the most salient questions in this areas of research, including: How are individual intellectual virtues and vices affected by their social contexts? Does being in touch with other open-minded people make us more open-minded? Conversely, does connection to other dogmatic people make us more dogmatic? Can groups possess virtues and vices distinct from those of their members? For instance, could a group of dogmatic individuals operate in an open-minded way despite the vices of its members? Each chapter receives commentary from two other authors in the volume, and each original author then replies to these commentaries. Together, the authors form part of a collective conversation about how we can know about what we know. In so doing, they not only theorize but enact social virtue epistemology.
Since Descartes, it has seemed natural for philosophers to take reason to be complete in each individual reasoner. Locke wrote, "God, that hath given the World to Men in common, hath also given them Reason..." In The Commons of the Mind, Annette C. Baier asks whether reason and other aspects of mind are possessed "in common" in the strong Lockean sense. She looks at the relation between two views of mind: on the one hand, the idea that mind is something possessed by each individual, independently of membership in a culture and a society, and on the other hand, the idea that mental activities and states are essentially social. She focuses her examination on three activities we take to be quintessentially mental ones, reasoning, intending, and moral reflection, in each case emphasizing the interdependence of minds, and the role of social practices in setting the norms governing these mental activities. Professor Baier defends the view that both our reasoning and our intention-formation require a commons of the mind, that is, the background existence of shared reasonings, intentions, and actions. However, she concludes that moral reflection, as a social capacity, is still in its infancy and that a commons of the mind is by no means assured with regard to morality. This volume is based on Professor Baier's Cams Lectures delivered at the meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in December 1995. Excerpt from The Commons of the Mind: "How are we to decide whether to take reason to be an essentially private thing that can, however, turn on a public display when it chooses to do so, or, like conversing, to be an essentially social skill, which can, however, be retained a while through periods of solitary confinement?"
Open-mindedness is often celebrated in our modern world--yet the habit of open-mindedness remains under-defined and may leave Christians with many questions. Is open-mindedness a virtue? What is the value of intellectual diversity, and how should Christians regard it? Is it a threat or an asset to the church and its tradition? Drawing on sources across time--from Aristotle to Augustine, Aquinas, and Wittgenstein--this book explores these questions from the perspectives of philosophy and the Christian faith.
Marková offers a dialogical perspective to problems in daily life and professional practices involving communication, care, and therapy.
As political discourse had been saturated with the ideas of "post-truth", "fake news", "epistemic bubbles", and "truth decay", it was no surprise that in 2017 The New Scientist declared: "Philosophers of knowledge, your time has come." Political epistemology has old roots, but is now one of the most rapidly growing and important areas of philosophy. The Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology is an outstanding reference source to this exciting field, and the first collection of its kind. Comprising 41 chapters by an international team of contributors, it is divided into seven parts: Politics and truth: historical and contemporary perspectives Political disagreement and polarization Fake news, propaganda, and misinformation Ignorance and irrationality in politics Epistemic virtues and vices in politics Democracy and epistemology Trust, expertise, and doubt. Within these sections crucial issues and debates are examined, including: post-truth, disagreement and relativism, epistemic networks, fake news, echo chambers, propaganda, ignorance, irrationality, political polarization, virtues and vices in public debate, epistocracy, expertise, misinformation, trust, and digital democracy, as well as the views of Plato, Aristotle, Mòzǐ, medieval Islamic philosophers, Mill, Arendt, and Rawls on truth and politics. The Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology is essential reading for those studying political philosophy, applied and social epistemology, and politics. It is also a valuable resource for those in related disciplines such as international relations, law, political psychology, political science, communication studies, and journalism.
Practice, Judgment, and the Challenge of Moral and Political Disagreement: A Pragmatist Account offers an account of moral and political disagreement, explaining its nature and showing how we should deal with it. In so doing it strikes a middle path between troublesome dualisms such as those of realism and relativism, rationality and imagination, power and justification. To do so, the book draws on the resources of the pragmatist tradition, claiming that this tradition offers solutions that have for the most part been neglected by the contemporary debate. To prove this claim, the book provides a large account of debates within this tradition and engages its best solutions with contemporary philosophical theories such as perfectionism, critical theory, moral realism, and liberalism. The question of the nature of disagreement is addressed both at the general theoretical level and more specifically with reference to moral and political forms of disagreement. At the more general level, the book proposes a theory of practical rationality based upon the notion of rationality as inquiry. At the second, more specific, level, it aims to show that this conception can solve timely problems that relates to the nature of moral and political reasoning.
In a free society, it is common to hear the request that one ‘keep an open mind.’ Just what exactly is it, however, to keep an open-mind? How does open-mindedness function? How does it square with important personal commitments? These issues are particularly acute when it comes to matters of religious belief in which open-mindedness can sound to the pious a bit too much like doubt. Certainly, in a discipline whose discourse remains rational dialogue, effort should be spent discerning the contours of this virtue, especially in light of its formal role in establishing responsiveness to new inquiries in matters philosophical and religious. This book provides a collection of essays serving to promote conversation about open-mindedness, its virtue (or lack thereof), and its role and application in problems in the philosophy of religion in particular.