Why open-mindedness is not a normative concept

In light of these potential downsides of open-mindedness, several philosophers have at-

tempted to develop an account of open-mindedness that dodges these criticisms: to characterise open-mindedness in a way that means it’s not possible to be too open-

minded, in a way that avoids these downsides. For example, Adler (2004) suggests open-mindedness is the ability to recognise one’s fallibility, that is always useful regard-

less of how certain one may be of any specific belief - but I don’t think this adequately explains why this higher-level uncertainty wouldn’t just ‘trickle down’ to make one less

certain of any specific belief. Others like Baehr (2011) and Kwong (2016) suggest that to be open-minded is more about being able to engage with new information in a certain

way, unconstrained by prior beliefs - but I do not think they go far enough in explain- ing how it is really possible to, for example, ‘detach from’ something one very strongly

believes. Many accounts of open-mindedness that attempt to dodge these criticisms end up characterising open-mindedness in such a broad way that they’re essentially equating it with ‘good thinking’ more generally. For example, Hare (2003) - who has

open-minded is “to be concerned to defuse any factors that constrain one’s thinking in predetermined ways” (Hare, 2003, p.5), which sounds suspiciously close to simply ‘being

unbiased.’ And in responding to Gardner’s concerns, Hare and McLaughlin clarify that “our conception of open-mindedness is strongly related to and presupposes the norms of

rationality.” (Hare and McLaughlin, 1994, p.287) This feels a little too much like a ‘get out of jail free card’ - if the concept of open-mindedness presupposes rationality, then

of course one should be open-minded - but what does the concept of open-mindedness add to the notion of rationality?

What these accounts are essentially attempting to do is to define open-mindedness as a normative concept. They want to define open-mindedness in such a way that makes it

categorically good: so that more open-mindedness is always better, and that total open- mindedness is an ideal to be attained. I’ll explain in this section and the next why I think

characterising open-mindedness in this way is both misguided and unnecessary. A first reason to think that trying to characterise open-mindedness normatively is not a fruitful

approach, of course, is that attempts to do so so far have not been particularly successful - but I think there is more to the problem than this. Attempts to characterise open-

mindedness as a normative concept end up equating it with ‘rationality’ more broadly, and so the claim that people “should be more open-minded” risks feeling rather trivial

- saying nothing over and above, “people should be more rational.”

If we want to think of open-mindedness as a normative concept, an interesting question

to ask is how it relates to other theories of normative rationality. Would a totally rational agent be maximally open-minded? I think its clear that the answer here is

no. Even a perfect Bayesian (i.e. an agent who always updates their beliefs in perfect accordance with Bayes’ rule) faces constraints - limited time and processing power -

meaning that seeking out more information, considering more hypotheses, and making fewer assumptions, is not necessarily always better. A perfect Bayesian updater still faces

two challenges: the challenge of deciding what and how much additional information to seek out, and the challenge of assessing the expected value of different actions given

their competing goals.

When it comes to these two additional challenges, the normative response is clearly not

1966) - how much you would be willing to pay for additional information prior to mak- ing a decision - makes clear that more information is not always better, if the costs of

obtaining it outweigh the amount it allows you to improve your decision-making. And Bayesian decision theory (James, 1985) makes explicit the idea that we have to con- sider and make tradeoffs between different goals when making decisions - which might sometimes (or even often) mean that being ‘more accurate’ is not optimal.

Its not clear, therefore, that a perfectly rational agent would be maximally open-minded - or that such an agent gets to avoid the trade-offs weve discussed between greater

exploration (more open-mindedness), and ‘exploiting’ what one already knows. If one somehow had unlimited time and cognitive capacity, then more open-mindedness might

always be better - but this does not seem like a realistic or even helpful ideal. This suggests that it is not appropriate to think of open-mindedness as a normative concept,

as categorically good, in the way that much of the philosophical discussion has tried to. Rather than representing some kind of ideal to be attained, then, open-mindedness is

just one side of a certain tradeoff that we face, between the benefits of having a certain, fixed, viewpoint, and the benefits of being able to change one’s mind.