Open mindedness is not a theoretical position, but an epistemic practice. Clearly, there are many different kinds of open mindedness, and the precise way of characterizing the relevant kind will depend on the subject matter in question, or, more simply, on what it is that one is open minded about. As a first pass at a definition, we might say that open mindedness, in its most general sense, is characterized by epistemic humility and adherence to a general ideal of intellectual honesty. This is true for open mindedness in general, but also for the specific variants we are interested in here, namely open mindedness in academic research, including interdisciplinary scientific discourse on the mind.
Whatever else it may be, open mindedness is also an attitude that is now shared by a growing number of researchers in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence (AI). We are all interested in the deep structure of the human mind and of conscious experience, but we also recognize how far away we still are from a unified theoretical model that could satisfy philosophers and scientists alike, a model that is conceptually convincing, able to integrate all existing data and make use of different methods at the same time. We do not want to fool ourselves. Although great progress has been made during the last five decades, it is not at all clear which combination of methods and which type of theoretical approach will generate the final breakthrough or even facilitate epistemic progress. We, meaning researchers of different stripes and from different disciplines comprising the Mind Sciences, including the authors contributing to this collection, are all in the same boat: we share a common epistemic goal, and we find ourselves working in a period of major historical transition. Progress in the empirical sciences of the human mind is certainly impressive and continuously gaining momentum, generating large amounts of new and sometimes surprising data. At the same time, exciting new approaches in formal modeling and philosophical meta-theory are increasingly opening up new perspectives. Yet it is not at all clear that we are already asking the right kinds of questions or exactly which combination of conceptual and empirical tools will do the trick. Seeing this fact clearly has already begun to change our attitude. Researchers from different disciplines are listening and talking to each other in new ways. Developing news forms of inter- (and intra-)disciplinary collaboration is an integral part of this process. “Having an open mind” also refers to a kind of scientific practice that involves honestly listening to representatives of exactly those approaches and academic disciplines that you may not have expected to make a contribution.
At the same time, open mindedness, understood as a fruitful and research-generating epistemic practice, should be clearly distinguished from arbitrariness, indecisiveness, lack of specificity, and, especially in the context of philosophy, lack of conceptual precision. Open mindedness is not just any kind of openness, and it is different from simply being non-committal or hedging. The challenge is to develop an understanding of open mindedness that is guided by theoretical considerations and empirical research findings alike. Ideally, this account should suggest specific strategies for cultivating forms of sincere interdisciplinary collaboration, sharpening the underlying conceptual issues, and developing precise predictions for future research. Open mindedness of this epistemically fruitful type will often be more about asking better questions than about committing to specific answers. It will involve an attitude of willingness to question or even reject one’s own prior commitments. It will be inherently critical (cf. Lambie 2014). And it will, perhaps, have more to do with striving for genuine understanding than with the search for truth and knowledge (Taylor 2014). One core idea of the great philosopher of science Karl Popper, which is now reappearing in the latest mathematical theories of brain functioning, was that we are always in contact with reality at exactly the moment at which we falsify a hypothesis: the moment of failure is exactly the moment at which we touch the world.[2] Similarly, the best scientific theories will be those that most easily lend themselves to falsification. For this reason, open mindedness involves, among other things, endorsing very specific theoretical positions purely for the sake of epistemic progress, rather than for the sake of being right, advancing one’s career, publishing in high-impact journals, and so on. Open mindedness is not so much about the specific content of a belief, be it personal or theoretical, but about the way in which it is held.
Searching for the right kinds of questions without considering the specific answers they are likely to generate or their immediate practical implications is a good first-order approximation to the specific type of attitude we are trying to describe. Another is to consider it as an interdisciplinary variant of the principle of charity. Our point is not just that philosophers should be empirically informed or that neuroscientists should listen carefully to constructive attempts at conceptual or methodological clarification. We need to develop a new culture of scientific investigation, and this will require new and sustainable forms of interdisciplinary collaboration. In philosophy, the “principle of charity” has long been recognized and pursued in the form of reading others’ statements according to the best, strongest possible interpretation—that is, to never attribute irrationality, falsehoods, or fallacies to another if alternative and more charitable readings exist. But we also all know how hard this can be. Still, the point is to not gratuitously maximize disagreement with the aim of showcasing the novelty or importance of one’s own arguments. Agreement should be optimized and as each other’s interpreters, we should always, whenever possible, prefer the most coherent reading in order to maximize the truth or rationality of what another philosopher says. We now need an interdisciplinary variant of this principle, and not only in bridging the gap between the humanities and the so-called hard sciences of the mind, but also in organizing novel and more efficient forms of cooperation. This point applies not only to the relationship between disciplines, but also to that between different generations of researchers. An optimization problem has to be solved: What is the best way of pooling intellectual resources and of efficiently structuring research? Therefore, a second step toward approximating an undogmatic attitude of open mindedness is to characterize it as an openness to the possibility that, for mind and consciousness, there may be no such thing as a single leading or dominating discipline, no Leitwissenschaft, as we say in German. Rather, not only does the connectivity between already-existing research programs have to be strengthened, the overall pattern of scientific practice also requires a new internal structure. What is needed is a new and as we will argue genuinely philosophical way of thinking.
A genuine receptiveness to unexpected ideas and different disciplinary perspectives also presupposes a certain set of abilities and different types of epistemic virtues. Some of these may lie in the field of what is commonly, if somewhat vaguely, called “first-person methods”, for instance in the systematic cultivation of contemplative practice (i.e., the philosophically motivated development of non-cognitive and non-intellectual epistemic abilities). Another is tolerance of ambiguity: to not only tolerate transient cognitive, conceptual and theoretical inconsistencies between disciplines or generations, but to view certain kinds of ambiguity as actually desirable, as a source of progress. Again, the challenge will be to distinguish productive types of ambiguity from those that are overly cautious or vague, hampering real progress. The same is true, of course, within academic disciplines themselves. Academic disciplines are not natural kinds. Contrary to what some might think, there may be no single authoritative or right way of doing philosophy, and there may be no clean way to distinguish philosophy from the empirical sciences. Open mindedness of the constructive kind will not waste time worrying too much about disciplinary demarcation criteria or labels, but will be open to different methods and approaches both between and within individual disciplines. Put differently, it may turn out to be less important whether a given question or position is philosophical (in the sense of being of a purely conceptual nature) or empirical than whether it genuinely helps advance the overall debate. Open mindedness clearly also has an inherently pragmatic dimension. When this kind of tolerance of ambiguity, for instance towards disciplinary borders, but also towards different (and ideally complementary) research methods is paired with conceptual clarity and precision, it becomes a driving force for research. This balancing act is what academic open mindedness is all about.