Openmindedness and truth

While openmindedness is often cited as a paradigmatic example of an intellectual virtue, the connection between openmindedness and truth is tenuous. Several strategies for reconciling this tension are considered, and each is shown to fail; it is thus claimed that openmindedness, when intellectually virtuous, bears no interesting essential connection to truth. In the final section, the implication of this result is assessed in the wider context of debates about epistemic value. §1 A CONUNDRUM Openmindedness is puzzling. As Riggs (2004; 2010), Battaly (2004), Montmarquet (1993), Baehr (2011) and others note, it is a paradigmatic intellectual virtue1—one which is generally taken to occupy an intellectually virtuous Aristotelian ‘midpoint’ between credulity and dogmatism, and one that typically features, as Riggs (2010: 172) puts it, at the “top of any list” of the intellectual or epistemic virtues2. Plausibly, it will be all the worse for a theory of intellectual virtue that excludes openmindedness as a bona fide intellectual virtue; what a good account of the intellectual virtues must do is have some explanation for what it is in virtue of which openmindedness should be rightly regarded as an intellectual virtue3, and such a story must highlight a clear connection between the trait in question and some fundamental epistemic good or goods4. A 1 The claim that openmindedness is a paradigmatic example of an intellectual virtue—conceived of as a disposition—is not incompatible with recognizing that there might be some interesting occurent psychological state that also fits the description of openmindedness. 2As Roberts & Wood (2007: 194) remark there are a range of more fine-grained vices that can fall under the banner of dogmatism, which they identify as doxastic complacency, stolid perseverance, perceptual rigidity, and comprehensional rigidity. 3 Or, alternatively, a satisfactory diagnostic story for why we are led to error. This kind of position is examined in detail in §2. 4 This connection has been articulated in very different ways. Montmarquet (1991) and Battaly (2004) for instance offer a motivational account of such a connection whereas Goldman a