Open‐Mindedness and Disagreement

Abstract

The current debate about disagreement has as rivals those who take the steadfast view and those who affirm conciliationism. Those on the steadfast side maintain that resolute commitment to a belief is reasonable despite peer disagreement. Conciliationists say that peer disagreement necessarily undermines warrant for one’s belief. This article discusses the relevance of open‐mindedness to the matter of peer disagreement. It shows how both the steadfast and the conciliatory perspective are consistent with a robust and substantive display of open‐mindedness. However, it also turns out that there are more ways to display open‐mindedness on the steadfast view than on the conciliatory view.

Virtue Theories of Argument

“…Determining which virtues are salient and how they are related are important issues for any virtue theory, hence virtue argumentation theory can benefit from earlier studies of the structure of the intellectual virtues (McCloskey 1998;Morin 2014;Bowell and Kingsbury 2015). In particular, most virtue argumentation theorists recognize open-mindedness as an important virtue (Cohen 2009), thereby building on a substantial body of recent work in virtue epistemology (Riggs 2010;Baehr 2011;Tiberius 2012;Spiegel 2019), the philosophy of education (Hare 1985(Hare , 2003(Hare , 2009Hare and McLaughlin 1998;Higgins 2009;Siegel 2009), and elsewhere (Song 2018). Other relevant virtues have been the focus of sustained research in other areas of philosophy.…”

“Changing” one's mind: Historical epistemology as normative psychology

“…One of the most commonly discussed virtues in virtue epistemology is “open‐mindedness” (Riggs 2010; Kwong 2017; Spiegel 2019). The debate on open‐mindedness concerns whether this virtue is truth conducive and, if so, under what circumstances.…”