36,183 research outputs found

    Open Mindedness

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    Dewey defines open-mindedness as “freedom from prejudice, partisanship, and other such habits as close the mind and make it unwilling to consider new problems and entertain new ideas (1910, p. 30). It is commonly included in lists of epistemic and argumentative virtues. We begin this paper with brief discussion of various accounts of open-mindedness. Our principle interest is in what it is to behave as an open-minded enquirer. Drawing on two cases, we consider whether open-minded behaviour varies between the contexts of solitary and community enquiry and whether inquirers face different challenges to behaving open-mindedly in each of these contexts. We conclude that although group deliberation introduces some extra barriers to open-mindedness, it can also make it easier to achieve by providing an external check that is absent in solitary inquiry

    Can Open-Mindedness be Primed? An Investigation into Creativity, Openness to Experience, and Open-Mindedness Among College Students with Implications for Counselors

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    With an ever-diversifying population, open-mindedness regarding an individual’s values and beliefs is important, especially for counselors. This study hypothesized that creativity could be a means to increase one’s open-mindedness. Utilizing a quasi-experimental design, this study examined the impact of a creative task on participants’ open-mindedness. Additionally, a correlation was sought between open-mindedness and the Big Five personality trait of Openness to Experience as well as a comparison between participants studying for careers in the helping professions (counselors, psychologists, and social workers) and all other participants. Two hundred and forty-four students at a small, private university participated. Results found no significant difference in open-mindedness scores between those completing a creative task and a control group. Evidence from the study also suggests that open-mindedness and Openness to Experience are distinct traits. Finally, those studying for the helping professions scored significantly higher in open-mindedness, but not in Openness to Experience, compared with all other participants. Questions and possible implications for both counseling programs and the counseling profession are discussed

    Open-Mindedness as a Critical Virtue

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    This paper proposes to examine Daniel Cohen's recent attempt to apply virtues to argumentation theory, with special attention given to his explication of how open-mindedness can be regarded as an argumentational or critical virtue. It is argued that his analysis involves a contentious claim about open-mindedness as an epistemic virtue, which generates a tension for agents who are simultaneously both an arguer and a knower (or who strive to be both). I contend that this tension can be eased or resolved by clarifying the nature of open-mindedness and by construing open-mindedness in terms of its function. Specifically, a willingness to take a novel viewpoint seriously is sufficient for making open-mindedness both an epistemic and a critical virtue

    Development and validation of a multi-dimensional measure of intellectual humility

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    This paper presents five studies on the development and validation of a scale of intellectual humility. This scale captures cognitive, affective, behavioral, and motivational components of the construct that have been identified by various philosophers in their conceptual analyses of intellectual humility. We find that intellectual humility has four core dimensions: Open-mindedness (versus Arrogance), Intellectual Modesty (versus Vanity), Corrigibility (versus Fragility), and Engagement (versus Boredom). These dimensions display adequate self-informant agreement, and adequate convergent, divergent, and discriminant validity. In particular, Open-mindedness adds predictive power beyond the Big Six for an objective behavioral measure of intellectual humility, and Intellectual Modesty is uniquely related to Narcissism. We find that a similar factor structure emerges in Germanophone participants, giving initial evidence for the model’s cross-cultural generalizability

    Open Mindedness as Engagement

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    Open-­-mindedness is an under-­-explored topic in virtue epistemology, despite its assumed importance for the field. Questions about it abound and need to be answered. For example, what sort of intellectual activities are central to it? Can one be open-­-minded about one's firmly held beliefs? Why should we strive to be open-­-minded? This paper aims to shed light on these and other pertinent issues. In particular, it proposes a view that construes open-­-mindedness as engagement, that is, a willingness to entertain novel ideas in one’s cognitive space and to accord them serious consideration

    Reading Ryder through Open-mindedness

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    Open-mindedness, considered by the epistemologists of virtue as a paradigmatic virtue is more than an agent’s aptitude that allows true knowledge, a virtue linked to an ontological and epistemological interpretation as well as an ethical and political normative proposal. Analyzing Ryder's work through its relationship with open-mindedness allows us to enrich a theory that considers this virtue as a core philosophical concept. Furthermore, it enlightens Ryder's philosophy showing some of its implications. This paper details relevant aspects of the relation between open-mindedness as virtue and Ryder´s pragmatic naturalism

    A Psychometric Study of Open-mindedness: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

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    Open-mindedness involves a willingness to consider a variety of perspectives, values, attitudes, opinions, and beliefs, especially when they contradict an individual\u27s own. This ability allows critical and rational thinking that is essential in education for learning new things and is studied by philosophers for cultivating intellectual humility. In this project we collected self-report responses using six different measures of open-mindedness from psychology, education, and philosophy from 462 Loyola students. We analyzed responses using factor analytic techniques. We hope this study will be useful in cultivating an interdisciplinary discussion about the definition, value, and cultivation of open-mindedness across the disciplines

    Open-mindedness and Deliberative Democracy

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    The dominant justificatory framework for democracy is deliberative democratic theory. It holds that democracy is legitimate to the extent it instantiates, and is guided by, the ideals and processes of good deliberation. This thesis challenges the dominance of the deliberative paradigm by highlighting an under-explored, and yet critical, element of the theory – its dependence on participants’ open-mindedness. The thesis addresses two central issues – the empirical feasibility and normative desirability of open-mindedness. By surveying the psychological literature on directionally motivated reasoning this thesis identifies robust findings across a range of contexts and subjects that people engaged with, or knowledgeable about, politics are systematically closed-minded in a manner resistant to straightforward correction. This analysis is twinned with a novel methodological approach to feasibility. This entails that if we are to maintain any connection to ‘ought implies can’ we cannot draw any firm dividing line in feasibility analysis between impossibility and the types of probabilistic discoveries produced by the social sciences, such as motivated reasoning. Therefore such results have to be accounted for in normative theorising. This thesis builds a novel account of open-mindedness and its related phenomena – credulity and closed-mindedness – and finds that whether one ought to be open-minded is sensitive to a range of contextual criteria. It applies this context-sensitive approach to the case of elected representatives as centrally important figures in modern democracies. In particular, the practice of elections and electoral campaigning require elected representatives to uphold their electoral commitments while in office, an obligation put at risk by open-mindedness. The adversarial political context faced by elected representatives and their limited internal capabilities provides further reasons to deviate from open-mindedness. These findings call into question the central role open-mindedness plays in deliberative democratic theory. As a result, they open up theoretical space to explore alternative justifications for democracy’s legitimacy

    Is open-mindedness truth-conducive?

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    What makes an intellectual virtue a virtue? A straightforward and influential answer to this question has been given by virtue-reliabilists: a trait is a virtue only insofar as it is truth-conducive. In this paper I shall contend that recent arguments advanced by Jack Kwong in defence of the reliabilist view are good as far as they go, in that they advance the debate by usefully clarifying ways in how best to understand the nature of open-mindedness. But I shall argue that these considerations do not establish the desired conclusions that open-mindedness is truth-conducive. To establish these much stronger conclusions we would need an adequate reply to what I shall call Montmarquet’s objection. I argue that Linda Zagzebski’s reply to Montmarquet’s objection, to which Kwong defers, is inadequate. I conclude that it is contingent if open-mindedness is truth-conducive, and if a necessary tie to truth is what makes an intellectual virtue a virtue, then the status of open-mindedness as an intellectual virtue is jeopardised. We either need an adequate reliabilist response to Montmarquet’s objection, or else seek alternative accounts of what it is that makes a virtue a virtue. I conclude by briefly outlining some alternatives
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