The most natural reason for thinking that you sometimes needn’t engage with relevant
counterarguments open-mindedly has to do with the sheer number of relevant counterarguments compared to your limited time and resources.2 But this doesn’t show that there is no pro tanto obligation to engage open-mindedly, nor that there is something more essentially problematic about open-minded engagement, which is what I will argue for. Even if there were all the time
and resources in the world, you often shouldn’t engage open-mindedly for epistemic and, sometimes, moral reasons.
There are, of course, many situations in which you should engage open-mindedly with relevant counterarguments. But there are standard situations3 in which you shouldn’t engage open-mindedly with relevant counterarguments because you know they are misleading.4 This is especially obvious when it comes to uncontroversial matters. There is something epistemically problematic about being so open to Zeno’s arguments that if each step looks compelling, you are prepared to reconsider whether things move. The same goes for trick “proofs” that 1=0 and Sorites-style arguments that I’m not bald. However difficult those arguments are to resolve, there is no doubt that 1≠0 and, trust me, I’m bald.5
Even when it comes to controversial matters there are standard situations in which you shouldn’t engage open-mindedly with relevant counterarguments because you know they are misleading. You shouldn’t be willing to reduce your confidence or marshal new reasons simply because you find out what you know might well happen anyway— that you are unable to find a flaw in an argument for a false conclusion. You needn’t be willing to marshal new reasons for evolution if you can’t figure out where the argument for intelligent design in biology goes
3 A situation is “standard” if there is nothing cognitively or conatively unusual. In particular, you neither fail to see
obvious connections between premises and conclusions of theoretical or practical arguments nor, especially, do you have deviant preferences— preferences, for example, to have high confidence in the conclusions of misleading arguments. Discussion of the need for this proviso is below.
4 You might know that the counterargument commits a fallacy or has false premises without knowing that the
conclusion is false or what fallacy it commits. Some of the arguments invoked in this chapter can be modified to show that you shouldn’t engage open-mindedly with apparently flawless arguments you don’t know are misleading but you do know are fallacious or have false premises. See note 7. I don’t have any new argument to offer against an obligation to engage when you fail to know that the counterargument is misleading or fallacious or has false
premises.
5 It may be required that you be open-minded to some degree, even toward arguments for uncontroversially false
conclusions. For example, in response to Zeno’s arguments that there is no motion, it might be required that you reduce your confidence that you understand what motion and change fundamentally amount to. If being willing to change at least some attitudes in response to a counterargument amounts to some degree of open-mindedness toward the argument— as I noted in Chapter 1 was suggested to me by Evangelian Collings— then this would amount to a requirement to be open-minded to some degree.
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wrong. You shouldn’t be willing to become less confident that it is impermissible to discriminate against gays and lesbians if you can’t find the mistake in a clever argument that discrimination is morally permissible. The counterarguments might have the trappings of soundness, but if you know ahead of time they are misleading— as you sometimes do— you shouldn’t be willing to be vulnerable to them.
I’m not just arguing that you shouldn’t be willing to here-and-now reduce your
confidence when you know a counterargument is misleading. This minimal claim might simply be a consequence of the justified belief condition on knowledge (provided that the degree of belief knowledge justifies you in having is sufficiently high). But the minimal claim would not establish that you shouldn’t engage open-mindedly with counterarguments you know are misleading. You engage open-mindedly when you are willing, not to here-and-now reduce your confidence, but conditionally willing to do so— when you are willing, before and during engagement, to reduce your confidence if, after engagement, you find the steps compelling and are unable to locate a flaw. It’s in that sense you that you often shouldn’t be open-minded when you know you’re right.
The argument has two premises:
(The knowledge premise) There are standard situations in which you know controversial propositions and, thus, know that a relevant counterargument is misleading.
(The linking premise) If you know, in a standard situation, that a counterargument is misleading, you shouldn’t engage open-mindedly with the counterargument. Therefore,
(C) There are standard situations in which you shouldn’t engage open-mindedly with a relevant counterargument against a controversial proposition.
The conclusion is true because you shouldn’t be open-minded toward relevant counterarguments you know are misleading. This is so however willingness is construed— as an endorsed
disposition or as requiring an act of will, a striving, or a trying. You shouldn’t have or endorse a disposition to reduce your confidence in the relevant situations. Nor should you strive or try through an act of will to reduce your confidence.
The argument for the knowledge premise occupied much of the first half of this book, in particular Chapter 2. To briefly sum up that argument, if you know a proposition, then you can know by a trivial inference that any argument against the proposition is an argument against a truth; it’s an argument with a false conclusion. Only misleading arguments have false
conclusions. Therefore, you can know to be misleading any argument against what you know. If you know controversial propositions, you can know that arguments against those propositions are misleading.
Controversial propositions are just propositions that people disagree about. There is nothing in that fact that prevents your epistemic support for controversial propositions from being quite strong— strong enough for knowledge.6 The mere existence of controversy does not itself render justified belief and, hence, knowledge impossible. Nor is knowledge inevitably destroyed by the fact that, when it comes to controversial beliefs, there might well be relevant counterarguments out there in which, after engagement, you wouldn’t be able to locate a flaw. If your knowledge that 1≠0 survives the actual existence of trick arguments to the contrary in which you cannot find a flaw, then knowledge of controversial propositions can survive the fact that there might well be such counterarguments against them.
6 I do not assume any particular account of knowledge. In particular, I assume neither an externalist nor internalist
account of the justification required for knowledge nor even that justification is required for knowledge. My sympathies are internalist, but what I conclude about knowledge of controversial propositions is a constraint on the proper account of knowledge, rather than supported by a prior account of knowledge.
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Therefore, you can know controversial propositions. It follows that you can know that relevant counterarguments against your controversial beliefs are misleading and, what is more, you can know that they’re misleading even if you haven’t engaged with them. It’s best to be clear about this: you can know that a relevant counterargument is misleading even if you have no idea what the content of the argument is (outside of its conclusion). In many central cases, you tend to have a least a minimal idea of what is involved in the counterargument and so, it might be thought, there has been at least minimal engagement already. But the claim here is stronger: you can know that an argument is misleading even if you are completely ignorant of its content (again, outside of its conclusion). You can know this because you can know that the conclusion of the argument is false. If someone tells you that they have an argument that the earth is less than an hour old, you know that the argument is misleading without knowing what the content of the argument is.
Similar considerations show that you can know that relevant counterarguments are misleading even if you have engaged with them and are unable to expose a flaw; again, you don’t lose knowledge that things move simply by being unable to figure out what’s wrong with Zeno’s arguments. So the mere fact that you can’t expose a flaw in some counterargument against one of your controversial beliefs does not by itself destroy knowledge. Because there are standard situations in which you know controversial propositions when confronted by relevant counterarguments, you can know in standard situations that relevant counterarguments against controversial propositions are misleading. That’s the knowledge premise.
6.3 FROM KNOWLEDGE TO CLOSED-MINDEDNESS