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 take-home 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.[1]
So we decided to use our editors’ introduction to briefly address a difficult, somewhat deeper, and in some ways more classical problem: that of what genuine open mindedness really is and how it can contribute to the Mind Sciences. The material in the collection speaks for itself. Here, and in contrast to the vast collection that is Open MIND, we want to be concise. We want to point to the broader context of a particular way of thinking about the mind. And we want to propose an account of what open mindedness could mean in the context of the contemporary, interdisciplinary Mind Sciences. This variant of open mindedness is characterized by epistemic humility, intellectual honesty, and a new culture of charity. It also has a pragmatic dimension: open mindedness of this kind is research generating and fosters an environment of sincere and constructive interdisciplinary collaboration. And it is profoundly inspired by the classical ideals of philosophy as a pursuit of genuine insight and rational inquiry, the importance of a critical and in a certain sense non-judgmental attitude, and the deep relationship between wisdom and skepticism as an epistemic practice. Finally, and again very classically, open mindedness has an ethical dimension as well: it implies sensitivity to normative issues, including issues of an anthropological, sociocultural, and political kind. By bringing these different strands of ideas together and creating a bigger (and admittedly still sketchy) picture of what “open mindedness” might mean in the interdisciplinary Mind Sciences, we hope to start a conversation about how an open-minded attitude and a charitable culture of collaboration can be cultivated in the future. This is very much intended as an invitation to further think about and develop this topic. We hope our readers will join us in this endeavor.