Speaker: Hein Duijf
Date and Time: Thursday, May 6th 2021, 16:30-18:00, Amsterdam time.
Venue: online.
Title: Should one be open-minded?
Abstract. I investigate the common intuition that open-mindedness is virtuous, while its opposite – close-mindedness – is vicious. I defend a positive claim that open-mindedness sometimes helps us achieve some basic epistemic goals. However, I also defend a negative claim that open-mindedness sometimes hinders the achievement of some basic epistemic goals. Open-mindedness is only epistemically beneficial if one has decent evaluative skills. These evaluative skills can be understood in several ways: as the social skill to determine whether another person is trustworthy or has mutual interests; or as the evaluative skill to determine whether certain argument or piece of evidence is truth-conducive. In the absence of sufficient evaluative skills and for low degrees of open mindedness, it seems plausible that open-mindedness will not be epistemically fruitful.
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