Metzinger, T. & Windt, J. M. (2015). What Does it Mean to Have an Open MIND?

In our discussions leading up to the Open MIND collection’s going online, we thought long and hard about how exactly to showcase the vast material in this collection and the ideas and motivations behind the project in our editors’ introduction. We first thought about using the introduction to briefly summarize the takehome message of every single target article, commentary, and reply, as is customary in introductions to edited collections. This struck us, however, as being both unwieldy and redundant: it would have entailed summarizing and commenting on a total of 117 texts. More importantly, due to the online format of the collection (including in-text search functions) and the inclusion of abstracts and keywords in the papers themselves, the authors have already provided concise introductions to their own texts. Retracing their steps in an editorial introduction would not have added anything to the value and usability of the collection. We then considered using the introduction to create our own personal best-of-Open-MIND list, discussing what we take to be the most valuable insights in every single article, or perhaps even focusing on the contributions that we personally take to be the most theoretically important. Though our own list of personal favorites seemed to write itself naturally during the editing process, this strategy quickly struck us as being at odds with our motivation for creating the collection in the first place. Using the editors’ introduction to create a personal best-of list would have been highly selective and biased by our own personal research interests and styles in a way that we felt would have contradicted our own ideal of open mindedness. In fact, for this reason, we decided to omit any references to the contributions to Open MIND in this introduction. These considerations naturally gave rise to a more difficult and more profound question: What exactly do we mean by “open mindedness,” not just in general, but in the context of interdisciplinary research on the mind? The strategy of using the contributions to the Open MIND collection as a foil for this more general academic variant of open mindedness was tempting. But again, we quickly realized that this approach would strike many readers (as well as, perhaps, some of our own authors) as highly idiosyncratic, arbitrary, or self-important.