Open-mindedness and intellectual humility

Abstract

Among those who regard open-mindedness as a virtue, there is dispute over whether the trait is essentially an attitude toward particular beliefs or toward oneself as a believer. I defend William Hare’s account of open-mindedness as a first-order attitude toward one’s beliefs and critique Peter Gardner’s view of open-mindedness as a non-commital posture and Jonathan Adler’s claim that open-mindedness is a second-order recognition of one’s fallibility as a knower. While I reject Adler’s account of open-mindedness as a meta-attitude, I affirm his intuition that there is a closely related second-order intellectual virtue pertaining to the attitude we take toward ourselves as knowers. However, this trait is intellectual humility not open-mindedness. I explain why both of these traits are intellectual virtues and how they properly build off one another in the virtuous mind.