Openmindedness - good thing or bad thing?: Philosophy Forums

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Openmindedness - good thing or bad thing?

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Openmindedness - good thing or bad thing?

peter rabbit
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Posted 04/23/09 - 11:30 PM:	#21
ducttape wrote: For the purposes of this topic can we assume that there is one reality and only one truth, and assume one's goal is to determine what that truth is. Progress in this quest would be my definition of aquiring knowledge. Yes. But; who is this person with the goal, what is it that is "determining... that truth," who is "acquiring knowledge" and what is the knowledge acquired? If you are talking about the isolated and divided feeling-thinking self that goes by the name of "I", and determining truth the reduction of all things into an abstract system of multiplying concepts and feelings that this self can only consecutively feel and think about, and must therefore spend a lifetime acquiring, then I'd say your quest for knowledge, useful and interesting as it certainly is, will not get you closer to "one reality" and "one truth".

Caldwell
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Posted 04/26/09 - 12:15 AM:	#22
Banno wrote: If you keep your mind too open, other people will fill it with garbage. I think we need to strike a balance between accepting just about any ideas and being critical of any idea.

BigEarth
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Posted 04/28/09 - 09:12 PM:	#23
Do you have to be open minded to get this? http://www.thetimetobeisnow.com/Downloads/TheEarth.pdf

Banno
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Posted 04/30/09 - 01:49 PM:	#24
Caldwell wrote: I think we need to strike a balance between accepting just about any ideas and being critical of any idea. and that balance is to be critical of every idea. I wonder at the difference in use between the US and the rest of the English speaking world in this regard. In the US, criticism seems to have a bad reputation. For the rest of us, to criticize is not just to say something is bad. To criticize something is to decide how it fits in with everything else.
Davidson: We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement. Russel Morris: There's a meaning there, but the meaning there doesn't really mean a thing... Ned: Such is life

Regislian
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Posted 05/01/09 - 02:02 AM:	#25
I like being openminded to things, eventhough I know being openminded is actually just a useless concept, which I feel necessary to make use of my, also useless, ability to think.

ducttape
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Posted 05/10/09 - 01:46 AM:	#26
BigEarth wrote: Do you have to be open minded to get this? http://www.thetimetobeisnow.com/Downloads/TheEarth.pdf[/quote] Maybe, if you define openmindedness as ignorance as we did earlier (ignorance of basic physics in this case). Of course the earth's atmosphere would not be able to pull objects around in it - if it accellerated from rest each morning. There is a fundamental property of matter called inertia which compels matter to maintain its speed and direction unless acted on by an outside force. Since there is no appreciable external force on any object on earth or in the atmosphere save for that of Earth's gravity itself, all objects remain stationary with respect to the Earth's spin. The one thing that does concern me about closing one's mind off, perhaps through education, is that it can cause you to think less creatively about things. In this case, for example, we simply named this strange property "inertia" - perhaps inertia is just some illusion resulting from other phenomena.

aletheist
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Posted 05/10/09 - 06:49 PM:	#27
Banno wrote: Caldwell wrote: I think we need to strike a balance between accepting just about any ideas and being critical of any idea. and that balance is to be critical of every idea. I agree completely with Banno on this. The opposite of "accepting just about any ideas" is dismissing any new idea out of hand, which is not the same as being critical of it. Banno wrote: In the US, criticism seems to have a bad reputation. For the rest of us, to criticize is not just to say something is bad. To criticize something is to decide how it fits in with everything else. Another excellent point. Here in the US, we tend to give "criticism" a negative connotation unless it is qualified as "constructive criticism". To me, especially in a philosophical context, to be critical is simply to ask relevant questions. Of course, here in the US, we often call that being "skeptical", which obviously has a much more specific meaning within philosophy.
"Be attentive, Be intelligent, Be reasonable, Be responsible." - Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984)

keda
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Posted 05/11/09 - 01:08 AM:	#28
It seems to me open-mindedness doesn't mean that you will accept every idea that comes by, or being more accepting of it, but rather the willingness to look into it rather than just dismissing it at face value just because it doesn't fit into your current views. Open-mindedness is often praised as a virtue but it soon becomes a vice when it is over done, not because it means you will accept rubbish, but because you waste time investigating it. At some point you must always close your mind and make a judgment or no knowledge will ever accumulate. In the end most people dismiss what doesn't look like being possible to fit into their views, and so the greatest challenge becomes building your views in the first place, not to be a heap of rubbish.
All about making money Free Europe Now How to fix your country In thought, men distance themselves from nature in order thus imaginatively to present it to themselves--but only in order to determine how it is to be dominated - Adorno and Horkheimer

Thinking Thing
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Posted 05/11/09 - 03:50 AM:	#29
BigEarth wrote: Do you have to be open minded to get this? http://www.thetimetobeisnow.com/Downloads/TheEarth.pdf Interesting. I got a few paragraphs through it and quit. My first annoyance was that a marble dropped from the tower of Pisa would fall straight down, ignoring conservation of angular momentum (the Coriolis effect). The second was that a marble falling straight down contradicts the idea of the Earth spinning, ignoring conservation of both angular and linear momentum (inertial motion). I don't even know what the article is about - I decided whatever it said, it was going to be stupid. Was I closed-minded to stop reading? Trivially, I might answer 'Yes' and hold that being closed-minded, in this case, was a good thing as it saved me time, effort and emotional stability. The fact that the author could not get very far without betraying assumptions that all of my experience and the experience of all people who have studied the motion of falling bodies know to be incorrect kept me from wasting time better spent on other matters. But... this is not the truth. Because had the author acknowledged the Coriolis effect and conservation laws, I would probably have read further, even if he held them to be false. Such audacity would have sustained my interest far longer - I would have been more open-minded to what he had to say. So it is not my view of reality that closed my mind to the author's view, of which I am still ignorant. It was not the recognition that the author was wrong, but the recognition that the author was ignorant. His assumptions grew incorrectly from this ignorance, and his argument would follow from these assumptions. Whatever his conclusions were, they were necessarily incorrect, or at least unfounded. To be open- or closed-minded about claims is to make a (perhaps tentative) judgement as to their truth. If the person putting forth the claim is him or herself ignorant of why his/her claim may be true or false, then it is not a question of open- or closed-mindedness, merely the recognition that one will not learn anything about a matter from one ignorant of that matter. I would say that to be closed-minded is to reject a claim irrespective of the likelihood of its truth. Open-mindedness, then, is a good thing, but this does not mean we need entertain every possible claim, only those from which we may reach new knowledge.

ducttape
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Posted 05/12/09 - 01:13 AM:	#30
Thinking Thing wrote: It was not the recognition that the author was wrong, but the recognition that the author was ignorant. His assumptions grew incorrectly from this ignorance, and his argument would follow from these assumptions. Whatever his conclusions were, they were necessarily incorrect, or at least unfounded. It is certainly a good way of pre-judging the conclusions, to know whether they are worth following until. I wonder though if that prejudice would cause you to perhaps be biased too negatively against the author. Because you are expecting him to not make any sense you might miss the grains of truth he might be hiding. We are all, after all, ignorant to some degree.

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