Why open-mindedness does not need to be a normative concept

I’ve argued that many accounts of open-mindedness attempt to characterise it in a way that avoids all downsides - so that more open-mindedness is always better - and

that this misguidedly assumes that open-mindedness should be a normative concept. But saying someone is open-minded seems very different from saying they are a perfect

reasoner. I think the confusion here arises because there is a common impression that open-mindedness is beneficial or virtuous, which leads one to think that it mustalways be beneficial. But to claim that open-mindedness is a virtue, and that more open- mindedness would be better, we do not need to claim that it’s a normative concept, that

it’s somehow categorically good. It’s sufficient to say that, given certain conditions that hold for humans in the real world, a greater degree of open-mindedness would produce

better outcomes.

In philosophy, in particular, the focus is on whether open-mindedness should be consid-

ered an ‘intellectual virtue.’ Many of the philosophers we discussed seem to be concerned that, if open-mindedness has downsides, it cannot be an intellectual virtue. But this

seems misguided - if we look more closely at what philosophers generally mean by ‘in- tellectual virtues’, they do not seem to be normative concepts in this sense. Intellectual

virtues are thought of as those thinking habits/dispositions which help one to form accurate beliefs about the world (closely related to the idea of epistemic rationality,

reasoning in ways that lead one to form true beliefs about the world.) We might then think of intellectual virtues as attempting to capture ways of thinking that help people

to become more epistemically rational, and open-mindedness as characterising a specific cluster of these ways of thinking which make it easier to change one’s mind.

To say that something is a virtue isn’t to say that more of it is always better, or that it never comes into conflict with other virtues. It is generally accepted that honesty is a

virtue even though it’s possible to sometimes be too honest, and even though honesty can sometimes come into conflict with other virtues such as kindness. As Schwarz and

Sharpe (2006) argue, virtues should not be considered in isolation, and more of one virtue on its own is not necessarily good - instead we need to consider how different

virtues interact with one another. Aristotle’s conception was that virtue lies at the mean between two extremes, between two vices - open-mindedness might be said to lie

at the mean between dogmatism and indifference, or gullibility.

The fact that open-mindedness might sometimes conflict with certainty or conviction,

and that sometimes open-mindedness can go too far, doesn’t threaten its status as an intellectual virtue any more than saying it’s possible to be too honest threatens its status

as a moral virtue. Intellectual virtues aren’t supposed to describe ideal standards to be maximised. They seem to be describing something closer to the prescriptive strategies I

discussed in the last chapter - ways of reasoning that people can reasonably be expected to develop, given cognitive constraints, that seem likely to improve human reasoning

relative to certain goals.

Intellectual virtues such as open-mindedness might then be thought of as describing

prescriptive strategies that specifically seem likely to help people attain epistemic goals - to form more accurate beliefs. We do not need to say that open-mindedness is a

normative concept, that more open-mindedness is always better, in order to call it an intellectual virtue.

5.3.4 Open-mindedness as an explore-exploit tradeoff

If we accept that open-mindedness is not a normative concept, and that closed-mindedness also sometimes has its benefits, then we might more usefully think of these concepts in

terms of a tradeoff. Given the constraints we are operating under as reasoners, we face a tradeoff between the benefits of being able to easily change our minds, and the ben-

efits of making assumptions that save time and effort, that help us make sense of the world. The concepts of open- and closed-mindedness have often been considered oppo-

sites, with open-mindedness perceived as good and closed-mindedness as bad - but it might be more appropriate to think of a spectrum. Going too far in either direction is

likely to be problematic, with different tradeoffs arising as you move in either direction.

The ‘optimal’ point on the spectrum will depend on the person, situation, and the

relevant goals. If some people’s brains are structured such that they find it easier to consider multiple viewpoints at once, or to switch between perspectives, then open-

mindedness will be less cognitively costly for them than for others. If some people find uncertainty more aversive or stressful than others, then open-mindedness will be more

emotionally costly to them. For certain topics, it may be more important to be able to make quick decisions with conviction - in which case, the costs of open-mindedness

go up as the benefits of closed-mindedness increase - whereas for others, deliberation and accuracy may be crucial - in which case the costs of closed-mindedness outweigh

the benefits. While we might talk about some people simply being ‘more open-minded’ than others, it might actually be more appropriate to say that different people face

different tradeoffs or incentives, and therefore where the optimal balance between open- and closed-mindedness lies depends on the individual and situation.

The idea of a tradeoff between open- and closed-mindedness seems closely related to the concept of an ‘exploration-exploitation tradeoff’ in (machine) learning. The tradeoff

here is between exploiting what you already know - going to a restaurant you have been to before and know will be pretty good, for example - and exploring to learn more and

potentially get better options in future - trying a new restaurant that might be better than your standard one, but which could also be worse. In decision making, the tradeoff

is between making a decision now based on the information you have, and delaying the decision to spend more time getting information (buying the first house you see

There’s no way to avoid this tradeoff - no way to get the best of both worlds - and no fully general solutions (though the study of these tradeoffs in computer science has come up

with algorithms which provide the optimal solution under certain specific assumptions.) How much one should explore versus exploit depends on your goals, and various features

of the situation. We might think of the open- versus closed-mindedness tradeoff as a kind of explore versus exploit tradeoff for forming beliefs: the tradeoff between learning and

exploring in order to ensure one forms the most accurate beliefs possible, and ‘exploiting’ one’s current best guess: acting based on what one knows, and saving the extra time

and cognitive effort. So just as there’s no fully general solution to the explore-exploit tradeoff, there’s no fully general answer to how open-minded one should be: it depends

on the situation and on your goals.

Exploration is valuable because it helps one avoid getting stuck at a local optimum:

a point that looks better than all those surrounding it, but which might not be the best possible option in the entire search space. A helpful visualisation/analogy here

is to think of mountain climbing - one might get ‘stuck’ at the top of a peak and be unsure whether there are higher peaks elsewhere, vision clouded by fog. To explore and

avoid getting stuck at a local optimum, one sometimes has to go ‘downhill’, to where conditions are clearer and it’s easier to see all the peaks. Applying this analogy to our

discussion of open-mindedness: we might sometimes get ‘stuck’ in a certain viewpoint, and if we want to learn may need to sometimes do things that feel like going downhill

- considering perspectives that don’t make sense to us or we don’t like, even if this leaves us confused for a while, or having to abandon assumptions that are helpful or

comforting. The difficult question is when and how much to explore, especially if we’re not really sure where higher peaks are, or if they even exist at all.