Closed-minded Belief and Indoctrination

Indoctrination Anxiety and t he Etiology of Belief Forthcoming in Synthese

People sometimes try to call others' beliefs into question by pointing out the contingent causal origins of those beliefs. The significance of such 'Etiological Challenges' is a topic that has started attracting attention in epistemology. Current work on this topic aims to show that Etiological Challenges are, at most, only indirectly epistemically significant, insofar as they bring other gener...

Darwinism and Indoctrination by Our Public Schools

an agency formally charged by society with the task of socializing the young in particular skills and values. We usually think of the school as being mainly concerned with teaching skills and knowledge.... But the schools in every society also engage in outright indoctrination in values. We may find this fact more readily apparent in societies other than our own ... the school socializes ... th...

Reasoning Independently of Prior Belief and Individual Differences in Actively Open-Minded Thinking

A sample of 349 college students completed an argument evaluation test (AET) in which they evaluated arguments concerning real-life situations. A separate regression analysis was conducted for each student predicting his or her evaluations of argument quality from an objective indicator of argument quality and the strength of his or her prior beliefs about the target propositions. The beta weig...

Teaching without Indoctrination: Implications for Values Education Teaching without Indoctrination: Implications for Values Education

Indoctrination, Coercion, and Freedom of Will

Manipulation by another person often undermines freedom. To explain this, a distinction is drawn between two forms of manipulation: indoctrination is defined as causing another person to respond to reasons in a pattern that serves the manipulator’s ends; coercion as supplying another person with reasons that, given the pattern in which he responds to reasons, lead him to act in ways that serve ...