Having an open mind involves, among other things, a specific way of being noncommittal with respect to the truth of a theoretical claim or proposition. As pointed out earlier, this is not the same as hedging: one can investigate and even defend the truth of a proposition or the adequacy of a given theoretical-conceptual or empirical model while at the same time acknowledging that it might be false. This continued openness to the falsifiability of scientific hypotheses, often associated with attempts to bring about specific ways of establishing and testing their falsity, is commonly regarded as a marker of good scientific practice. It is also the core of intellectual honesty. As Russell tells us, “intellectual integrity [is] the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence, or of leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive” (2009, p. 579). The moment at which we give up this openness is the moment at which we lapse into dogmatism. The real danger, says Russell, is never the content of a doctrine, be it religious or political, but always “the way in which the doctrine is held” (Russell 2009, p. 582). Of course, this intrinsic connection between wisdom and not-knowing has long been recognized (Ryan 2014). In the Gorgias, Socrates explicitly claims that he is happy to be refuted if he is wrong. In fact, he claims he would rather be refuted than to refute someone else because it is better to be delivered from harm oneself than to deliver someone else from harm. And in the Apology (21d), after being accused of blasphemy and of corrupting the youths of Athens, Socrates famously states, before the tribunal of 501 Athenians, “I neither know nor think that I know”. Both in Western and in Eastern philosophy, the acknowledgment of not-knowing has long been regarded as an antidote to epistemic harm.
This is not the place to enter into a discussion of open mindedness in the context of the philosophy of science or to trace the history of philosophical theorizing about the concept of “wisdom”. We do, however, want to draw attention an important point: open mindedness as an epistemic practice involves a specific kind of mental attitude and is closely related to certain kinds of phenomenal states. Cultivating the relevant kinds of conscious states and epistemic attitudes makes a real difference, or so we suspect, by facilitating the development of a research climate that is conducive to constructive and genuinely fruitful discourse and new forms of collaboration. This is an empirical prediction, and it could turn out to be false. For now, our claim is that the kind of open mindedness we describe here is needed if we are even to begin investigating the truth of this prediction. If, at the end of the day, this strategy should fail —that is, if there turn out to be good empirical reasons for rejecting the claim that there actually are specific phenomenological profiles and mental attitudes that decisively facilitate progress in interdisciplinary research on the mind—this would be a valuable insight. But this insight about the value of open mindedness in scientific discourse itself depends on an initial willingness to cultivate exactly the kind of epistemic practice in question.
If this is right, there is another reason to be interested in open mindedness in the present context. This is that open mindedness, as an epistemic practice and mental attitude, is itself a potential target for interdisciplinary consciousness research. Philosophy of mind in particular can contribute by laying the theoretical–conceptual groundwork for the further empirical investigation of open mindedness in academic life and proposing points of contact with psychology and cognitive neuroscience. To make this inner connection more clearly visible, we will now briefly sketch the outlines of such an account.
Where might one begin investigating open mindedness as a mental state? At the outset, it stands to reason that the relevant form of open mindedness has precursors in the history of philosophy and might also be interestingly related to current debates on philosophical methodology. After all, the principles of epistemic humility, intellectual honesty, charitability, and searching for more accurate questions while cultivating a productive form of tolerance of ambiguity are deeply rooted in the history of philosophy. On a systematic and more general level, one would expect philosophy, as the discipline traditionally most concerned with the status of knowledge and truth and the practice of inquiry itself, to be able contribute to an analysis of what open mindedness really is. Based on these considerations, four questions seem particularly relevant: one, what is the relationship between open mindedness, intuitions, and philosophical methodology? Two, what is the relationship between open mindedness and the tradition of philosophical skepticism? Three, what would answers to the first two questions tell us about the relationship between open mindedness and the allegedly most pressing problem for interdisciplinary consciousness research, the subjectivity of phenomenal mental states? Might we even use the analysis of open mindedness to formulate principles for the investigation of phenomenal states and the status of first-person data? And four, how is open mindedness as an epistemic stance related to ethical and practical questions? For instance, how can the analysis of open mindedness contribute to normative issues related to neurotechnological interventions in the human brain? And does it lead to any specific suggestions on how to cultivate new forms of interdisciplinarity?
The concept of intuition has a long philosophical history and is also firmly rooted in everyday language and folk psychology.[3] Intuition, in everyday language, refers to immediate and direct insight, independent of reflection, to instinctively grasping or sensing a matter of fact. In the history of philosophy, the concept of intuition often has dual epistemic and experiential readings, and this is true for the traditions of rationalism and empiricism alike. In the Rules for the Direction of the Mind (Rule 3), Descartes describes intuitions as an immediate, effortless, and indubitable kind of seeing with the mind, which is even more reliable than deduction. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (IV.II.I), Locke tells us that intuition involves a direct perception of ideas that is, once more, the basis of all forms of knowledge. The close relationship between intuitions and sensory perception, and especially seeing, is already evident in the Latin verb intueri, which means to look and observe, but also to examine or consider. The central underlying element is the immediacy and directness of perception, which is imported into the concept of intuition via an implicit analogy between the phenomenology of sensory perception and genuine insight in an epistemic sense.
The epistemic status of intuitions, as well as different ways of defining the concept of intuition, are a matter of controversy in the current debate on philosophical methodology. The debate on intuitions stands at the center of the confrontation between classical and allegedly intuition-based conceptual analysis conducted in the proverbial philosophical armchair (for critical discussion, see Cappelen 2012) and recent claims from experimental philosophy. Experimental philosophy typically involves collecting laypersons' responses to vignettes inspired by well-known philosophical thought experiments (for discussion, see Knobe & Nichols 2008; Alexander 2012; for a general introduction to intuitions in philosophy, see Pust 2014). These questionnaires are supposed to offer a new, empirically-based method for investigating intuitions and the underlying cognitive mechanisms. According to some experimental philosophers (for discussion and further references, see Alexander & Weinberg 2007), the results of these types of studies cast doubt on the reliability of intuitions as a mark of philosophical expertise. Intuitions, in this view, are simply too variable and context-dependent to count as insights in any deep, epistemologically interesting sense.
Here, we would like to propose a definition of intuitions that is compatible with the historical literature as well as being phenomenologically and empirically plausible. Departing from our brief remarks on the history of intuitions in philosophy, we suggest that intuitions are the “phenomenal signature of knowing”, a seemingly direct and effortless way of perceiving or seeing with one’s mind arising independently of a prior process of reflection. The analogy between intuiting and perceiving provides an entry point for a naturalized concept of intuition. But it also suggests a potentially dangerous equivocation between phenomenological and epistemological readings of the concept of intuition. If the phenomenology of intuiting is indeed similar to that of perceiving in virtue of its effortless and seemingly direct experiential quality, then this immediately poses the problem that the phenomenology of intuiting and perceiving can be deceptive: what seems, subjectively, to be a case of veridical perception can always turn out to be a hallucination or an illusion (for an introduction to the problem of perception, see Crane 2014), or a nocturnal dream (see Windt & Metzinger 2007; Metzinger 2013a; Windt 2015). Similarly, what seems to bear the marks of genuine insight can always turn out to be an epistemic illusion.[4]
If intuitions are indeed mental states characterized by a specific phenomenology, this suggests that the attempt to simultaneously characterize them both as involving genuine insight and as the basis of knowledge rests on what elsewhere we call the “E-error”: a category mistake in which epistemic properties are ascribed to something that does not intrinsically possess them (Metzinger & Windt 2014, p. 287). If our account of intuitions is on the right track, then intuitions are potentially dangerous, because in virtue of their phenomenology and their possessing an occurrent conscious character of “insight”, they predispose us to believe certain propositions merely on the basis of seemingly “understanding” them. The phenomenology of intuitions is such that it immediately and effortlessly creates a bias towards accepting the truth of propositions that, subjectively, we simply know or feel to be true, while simultaneously preventing us from seeking further justification, because these truths also seem unconstructed, indubitable, and self-evident. In this view, one of the factors underlying intuitions and intuitive plausibility is that, because of their phenomenal character, they prevent open-minded inquiry. Intuitions turn us into inner dogmatists. And this is true not only for individual propositions held to be intuitively true, but also for continued adherence to theoretical claims about the status of intuitions as a guide to or even as the basis of knowledge and genuine insight. The phenomenal character of intuitions even predisposes us towards certain meta-theoretical intuitions about the general epistemic status of intuitions, and we can see the marks of this throughout the history of philosophy as well as in contemporary debate (e.g., Bealer 1998; Chudnoff 2013). The analysis of intuition clearly should not itself be driven by intuitions. Instead, this is a prime example of where an open mind is needed.
Our own account starts out from the assumption that intuitions are a specific class of phenomenal states. Human beings can direct their introspective attention toward the content of the relevant states and, at least partly and under certain conditions, report on it. Many higher animals very likely also possess intuitions even if they are not able to directly attend to or verbally report on their intentional contents. Before the evolution of biological nervous systems and before the emergence of phenomenal consciousness, no intuitions existed on our planet. Patients in coma or human beings in unconscious, dreamless sleep have no intuitions in the sense intended here. At the same time, intuitions probably have a long evolutionary history: there must have been a point in time at which the first intuition appeared in the mind of some conscious organism and this specific type of inner state then propagated itself across thousands of generations while its functional profile became ever more differentiated. Plausibly, one could describe the having of intuitions as an ability—a mental ability that was adaptive and that was acquired gradually.
If one takes the phenomenal character of intuitions seriously, this ability clearly seems to be an epistemic ability: prima facie, to have an intuition means to have the subjective experience of knowing something, directly and immediately, without necessarily being able to express this knowledge linguistically or to provide an epistemic justification. Typically, inner experience seems to present knowledge to the subject of experience, even if one does not know how and why one possesses this knowledge. Intuitions are the phenomenal signature of knowing, a seemingly direct form of “seeing” the truth. As soon as we ascribe epistemic status to intuitions on the basis of their phenomenology alone, however, we commit the E-error. “Epistemicity”, the phenomenal quality of “insight” and “comprehension”, or the feeling of being a knowing self, as such is only a phenomenal quality, just as redness, greenness, and sweetness are. One well-known philosophical problem is that the phenomenological and epistemological readings can always come apart, because what phenomenologically appears as a kind of perception could really be a hallucination or an illusion. Subjectively indistinguishable mental states do not necessarily have the same epistemic status. Trivially, the difference between veridical perception and hallucination (in the philosophical sense; see Macpherson 2013; Crane 2014) is not available on the level of subjective experience itself, and therefore the confusion between phenomenal character and epistemic content is naturally grounded in the transparent phenomenology, the seeming directness and immediacy of the relevant kinds of phenomenal states. The same is true for the phenomenology of intuition. Conflating epistemic status and phenomenal character becomes particularly dangerous if it is imported into theoretical debates, and if the phenomenal quality in question is that of “epistemicity”, of direct and non-inferential knowing itself. The important lesson is that as phenomenal states, such states are neither necessarily veridical nor necessarily non-veridical. Experience as such is not knowledge. As subjective experiences, these states possess no intentional properties and cannot be semantically evaluated by concepts like “truth” or “reference”. Phenomenal transparency is not epistemic transparency.
Many, but not all, of our philosophically relevant intuitions are characterized by an additional element of certainty, of just knowing that one knows. Here, the phenomenal signature of knowing does not only refer to the content of what is seemingly known in a direct, and non-inferential manner, but to our higher-order, subjectively-experienced knowledge itself. This means that the phenomenal character of ”epistemicity” that accompanies and tags the respective mental content as an instance of knowing has itself become transparent. Its representational character is not introspectively available anymore: the fact that epistemicity is itself the content of a non-conceptual mental representation, that it is internally constructed and always contains the possibility of misrepresentation, is veiled by an experience of immediacy. Transparency is a special form of darkness. Something constructed is experienced as a datum, as something given. Therefore, in stable intuition states we not only experience the first-order content as directly given, but the epistemicity of the state itself. Let us call such states intuitions of certainty. Referring to G. E. Moore[5] one might say that the phenomenal signature of knowing has itself become diaphanous or transparent: according to my own subjective experience, I simply know that I know, and the possibility of error and falsehood is not given on the level of conscious experience itself. From the fact that a conscious perception instantiates the phenomenal quality of “greenness” it does not follow that the underlying process or even the perceptual object are green. The same is true for the “phenomenal signature of knowing” that characterizes intuitions.
Intuitiveness is a property of theoretical claims or arguments, relative to a class of representational systems exhibiting a specific functional architecture. Conscious human beings are one example of such a class. The brains of human beings are naturally evolved information-processing systems, and when engaging in explicit, high-level cognition they use specific representational formats and employ characteristic styles of processing. Whenever we try to comprehend a certain theory, an argument or a specific philosophical claim, our brains construct an internal model of this theory, argument, or claim (Johnson-Laird 1983, 2008; Knauff 2009). This mostly automatic process of constructing mental models of theories possesses a phenomenology of its own: some theories just “feel right” because they elicit subtle visceral and emotional responses, some claims “come easily”, they are experienced as sound and healthy, and some arguments (including the implicit assumptions upon which they rely) seem “just plain natural”. Some forms of skepticism appear “healthy” to us, while others do not—there seems to be a deep connection between sanity and reason.
There may be two overarching reasons for this well-known fact. First, theories that are intuitively plausible exhibit a high degree of “goodness of fit” in regard to our network of explicit prior convictions. More generally, they optimally satisfy the constraints provided by our conscious and unconscious models of reality as a whole. These microfunctional constraints implicitly represent both the totality of the knowledge we have acquired during our lifetime and certain assumptions about the deep causal structure of the world that proved functionally adequate for our biological ancestors. Theories that immediately feel good because they are characterized by a high degree of intuitiveness maximize a specific kind of internal harmony. What we introspectively detect is a high degree of consistency, but in a non-linguistic, subsymbolic medium. Therefore we could also replace the term “intuitiveness” with a notion like “intuitive soundness” or “introspectively detected consistency or goodness of fit” (relative to a preexisting model of reality). In principle it should be possible to spell out this point on a mathematical level, by describing the underlying neural computations and their properties in a connectionist framework, or by utilizing the conceptual tools provided by dynamical systems theory or predictive coding.
A second perspective might be to look at intuitions not from a representationalist, but from biophysical perspective. We are embodied beings, and there are different levels of embodiment (Metzinger 2014). Computational, but also thermodynamical imperatives guide the self-organization of representational states in our brains. One major causal factor underlying the conscious experience of “intuitive soundness“ might simply be the amount of energy it takes to activate and sustain a mental model of a given theory, plus the amount of energy it would take to permanently integrate this theory into our pre-existing model of reality. Our mental space of intuitive plausibility can in principle be described as an energy landscape: claims that “come easily” do so because they allow us to reach a stable state quickly and easily, theories that “feel good” are theories that can be appropriated without a high demand of energy. Theories that don’t feel good have the opposite characteristics: they “don’t add up”, they “just don’t compute”, because they endanger our internal harmony and functional coherence, and it would take a lot of energy to permanently integrate them into our overall mental model of reality. They are costly. In a biophysical system like the human brain there may well be a direct connection between thermodynamic efficiency and reduction of complexity on the level of information processing. If biological self-organization involves continuously minimizing the prediction errors generated by the flow of “hypotheses” originating in the brain’s current model of reality, then the process that creates what today we call our deepest “theoretical intuitions” may also be described as such an attempt to reduce variational free energy. While on a more abstract level this process can be said to minimize representational complexity while simultaneously maximizing the evidence for the overall model, it is also a physical process that is not guided by abstract rationality constraints, but simply one that optimizes metabolic and statistical efficiency at the same time (Sengupta et al. 2013; Friston 2010; Hohwy 2013).
We need an open mind, because many of the best future theories about the human mind and conscious experience may just “not compute” for beings like us. However, what does or does not compute is, in part, a contingent fact determined by the functional architecture of our brain, shaped by millions of years of biological evolution on this planet, as well as—to a much lesser degree—by our individual cognitive history and a given cultural/linguistic context. The phenomenology of intuitive soundness—the fact that some arguments seem “just natural”—is a biological phenomenon that is additionally supported by a short cultural history of cognitive niche construction. In this framework, the space of intuitive plausibility reflects exactly those aspects of our evolutionary history and of our more recent cognitive niche that have become transparent—that we have long ceased to experience as evolved and culturally driven, but regard as unconstructed, immediate, and even indubitable. Importantly, the inner landscape of our space of intuitive plausibility is not simply contingent on our evolutionary history and on certain physical and functional properties of our brains—it was optimized for functional adequacy only. This process of optimization serves to maximize reproductive success and to sustain an organism’s coherence and physical existence, but this does not mean that the content of intuitions is epistemically justified in any way. This is especially true because the evolved functional adequacy of intuitions applies to everyday action in practical contexts and ancestral environments—not to abstract reflection in theoretical contexts or cognitive environments. This is why searching for a comprehensive theory of the conscious mind presents such a major challenge to our intellectual honesty: it demands that we investigate a claim even if it contradicts our deepest intuitions, even if it cries out for a more moderate, weaker version because it just “doesn’t compute” and somehow seems “just too radical”, costly, painful or even self-damaging. In this view, any philosophical methodology that just tries to make our “deepest intuitions” explicit in a conceptually coherent manner appears to be a rather trivial enterprise. If our claims here are correct, then intuition-mongering may even border on intellectual dishonesty. At best, it just charts our intuition space; at worst, it confuses failures of imagination with insights into conceptual necessity (“philosopher’s syndrome”, according to Dennett 1991, p. 401).
If intuitions can be described as creating a transparent inner bias and perhaps even as involving an inner form of dogmatism, then we might, it would seem, make progress in understanding open mindedness as a mental state by looking to cases characterized by the phenomenal signature of not knowing and of uncertainty. The philosophical tradition of skepticism seems to be a promising place to look. Skepticism comes in many different strengths and flavors (see Landesman 2002 for a comprehensive introduction), but what is distinctive about philosophical skepticism is perhaps best captured by the meaning of the original Greek term, where skeptic (related to the Greek verb sképtomai) refers, quite simply, “to one who inquires into the truth of things or wishes to gain knowledge about some subject matter” (Landesman & Meeks 2003, p. 1). Skeptical inquiry, in the philosophical sense, is not so much concerned with the truth of particular beliefs or theoretical claims as with the possibility of knowledge and certainty in a more fundamental sense. It also does not always aim at denying the truth of our most basic beliefs by construing outlandish skeptical hypotheses such as the Cartesian evil genius. Generally, skeptical arguments cast doubt on commonly (and often implicitly and unreflectively) accepted means for attaining knowledge—and in so doing frequently give rise to new and fruitful discussions on how our epistemic practices might be improved. Throughout the history of philosophy, skepticism, at its best, has often been deeply constructive and has enabled genuine progress.
The philosophical tradition that has perhaps been most concerned with cultivating a skeptical attitude and with uncertainty and not-knowing as a mental state, at least in Western philosophy, is Pyrrhonian skepticism, which was one of the two major schools of skepticism in antiquity. Here, we want to tentatively suggest that it could be instructive to trace many of the aspects that we claim characterize open mindedness all the way back to the Pyrrhonian skeptics. This claim might strike some as surprising, because Pyrrhonian skepticism is often seen as a particularly radical and excessive kind of skepticism (Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a classical example of this). It is fair to say that in contemporary philosophy, Pyrrhonian skeptics are an endangered species (for an introduction, see Fogelin 1994; Sinnott-Armstrong 2004; especially Stroud 2004; Fogelin 2004), with the tradition often being regarded as a bit of a historical oddity. This is fueled by what little is known of its founding father, Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360 to c. 270 BCE). Most of this is anecdotal, as Pyrrho wrote nothing himself (Bett 2014). Diogenes, for instance, tells us that Pyrrho:
led a life consistent with this doctrine, going out of his way for nothing, taking no precaution, but facing all risks as they came, whether carts, precipices, dogs, or what not, and, generally, leaving nothing to the arbitrage of his sense; but he was kept out of harm’s way by his friends, who […] used to follow close after him. (1943, 9.62)
Pyrrho did not return the favor, reportedly passing by an acquaintance who had fallen into a slough without offering him any help (ibid., 9.63). Clearly, this is a far cry from the constructive and research-generating type of open mindedness we hope to promote here.
A more thoughtful and differentiated account can be found in Sextus Empiricus’s (1987) treatment of skepticism, where he refers solely to Pyrrhonian skepticism.[6] According to Sextus:
Skepticism is an ability, or mental attitude, which opposes appearances to judgments in any way whatsoever, with the result that, owing to the equipollence of the objects and reasons thus opposed, we are brought firstly to a state of mental suspense and next to a state of ‘unperturbedness’ or quietude. (1987, Chapter 4)
Clearly, there is at least a superficial similarity between Sextus’s claim that skepticism is an ability and our description of open mindedness as an epistemic practice. Here, we briefly review the most important characteristics of Pyrrhonian skepticism and argue that there indeed exist a number of insightful parallels to open mindedness as an epistemic practice.
A first point is that from the perspective of Pyrrhonian skepticism, dogmatism is the end of reasoning and the opposite of philosophical reflection. At the same time, the anti-dogmatism of the Pyrrhonian skeptics did not prevent them from giving “assent to the feelings which are the necessary results of sense-impressions” (1987, 7.13). The Pyrrhonian skeptics merely withheld assent to “the non-evident objects of scientific inquiry” (ibid., 7.13). As an early form of what we call academic open mindedness, Pyrrhonian skepticism was directed, first and foremost, “against the dogmas of ‘Professors’—not the beliefs of common people pursuing the honest (or, for that matter, not so honest) business of daily life. The Pyrrhonian skeptic leaves common beliefs, unpretentiously held, alone.” (Fogelin 2004, p. 163)
This suggests that if we want to contrast the cultivation of an anti-dogmatic mindset with intuitions, this point should be applied not to intuitions and feelings of certainty in general, but to philosophical intuitions in particular. Philosophical intuitions, in virtue of their distinctive phenomenal character, involve a specific and often highly-specialized form of inner dogmatism: they quickly and effortlessly create an inner bias towards a given theoretical position, while at the same time making it seem so indubitable and certain as to prevent further critical inquiry. Even though the terminology is, of course, different, the Pyrrhonian attitude of anti-dogmatism presents itself as an antidote to exactly the type of uncritical, judgmental attitude that is the hallmark of intuitions.
Second, the Pyrrhonian skeptic, in his quest for “quietude in respect of matters of opinion and moderate feeling in respect of things unavoidable” (Sextus 1987, 12.25), makes use of stereotyped tropes or modes of argument. The tropes are all very similar in structure, involving a series of contrasts between opposing statements, with the aim of leading to irresolvable disagreement and inducing a suspension of judgment. True to the characterization of the Pyrrhonian skeptic as one who inquires, “the modes […] were not designed to inhibit reasoning. Rather, they were designed to assist the Pyrrhonian in continuing to inquire by shielding her from the disquieting state of dogmatism” (Klein 2014). As Sextus (1987, 7.13) tells us, the Pyrrhonian, when entering into a debate with the dogmatist, does not assert his arguments in the manner of claiming their truth; instead, he asserts them only provisionally and purely for the sake of argument, enabling him to practice epoché, or to bracket his assumptions about the truth of the relevant propositions. The tropes, then, are not just a strategy for convincing one’s opponent, but a specific way of cultivating this more general kind of epistemic attitude:
Like piano exercises for the fingers that would result in semi-automatic responses to the printed notes on a sheet of music, the modes were mental exercises that would result in semi-automatic responses to claims being made by the dogmatists—those who assented to the non-evident. (Klein 2014)
We certainly do not mean to suggest that we should all become Pyrrhonian skeptics by formulating modernized versions of the tropes. We only want to point out that the naturalistic strategy of preparing and then handing over questions to scientific research can be viewed as fulfilling a similar function, namely as cultivating the epistemic virtues and abilities associated with open mindedness. This in itself, of course, is nothing new. A similar idea can be found, for example, in Russell’s claim that,
as soon as definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes possible, this subject ceases to be called philosophy, and becomes a separate science. […] those questions which are already capable of definite answers are placed in the sciences, while those only to which, at present, no definite answer can be given, remain to form the residue which is called philosophy. (Russell 1912/1999, p. 112)
Following Russell, philosophy itself is a specific variant of cultivating what, earlier, we called a tolerance of ambiguity, and its value is “to be sought largely in its very uncertainty” (1912, 113). The Pyrrhonian tropes are just one example from the history of philosophy of how a particular style of argumentation can be used not just to generate particular insights but also to promote a particular style of thinking. Analogously, one of the reasons why interdisciplinary collaboration and data-driven arguments in philosophy are valuable may be that they are a way of practicing and cultivating open mindedness. Interdisciplinary research projects don’t just produce new data, but leave their marks on the minds of the researchers involved as well.
Third, the suspension of judgment, which is the outcome and in some sense the aim of the modes, is described by Sextus as a state of mental rest and as an “untroubled and tranquil condition of the soul” (1987, 4. 10). It also, however, has a normative dimension, involving the claim that if there is irresolvable disagreement between two opposing positions, one should refrain from adopting either of them.
In the ambiguity between these two readings, there is a nice point of contact between open mindedness as a mental state and something that today one might call the ethics of belief (Clifford 1877/1999; Chignell 2010) and of belief formation. There is clearly a social (Goldman 2010) and perhaps even an interdisciplinary dimension of epistemology, both in a theoretical and in practical sense. As is the case for the dialectical confrontation between the Pyrrhonian and the dogmatist, progress (in the sense of suspension of judgment) will often result from confronting one’s own convictions with those held by others, as well as from confronting them with real-world counterexamples.[7] By contrast, accumulating evidence suggests that merely simulating this process by charting one’s own intuitive responses to carefully calibrated thought experiments is not nearly as effective, and is actually often quite misleading (Gendler & Hawthorne 2010; Alexander 2012; Dennett 2013). Doing, as the Pyrrhonian skeptics realized, is better than merely imagining.
Indeed, empirical evidence suggests that our natural confidence in naïve realism is so strong that it remains largely unscathed by theoretical evidence to the contrary. In one study, when participants read a text about cognitive limitations and biases, this did not affect their confidence in their own social judgments. Confidence levels were only significantly reduced when theoretical challenges to naïve realism were presented alongside specific examples, such as visual illusions. As the authors put it, “acknowledging susceptibility to bias […] may not always translate to actually tempering one's confidence or expressing an openness to change. Instead, experiencing unconscious cognition and bias was required to reduce confidence and closed-mindedness” (Hart et al. 2015, 6). This acknowledgment of the value of the practical and experiential dimensions of suspending judgment is implicit in the Pyrrhonian tropes.
Fourth, ataraxia, or quietude, according to Sextus, automatically and effortlessly follows on the heels of the suspense of judgment. This unintentional character of quietude is important, because it means not only that quietude cannot be actively brought about, but also that it is found in a place quite different from that in which one was looking:
the Skeptics were in hopes of gaining quietude by means of a decision regarding the disparity of the objects of sense and of thought, and being unable to effect this they suspended judgment; and they found that quietude, as if by chance, followed upon their suspense, even as a shadow follows its substance. (Sextus Empiricus 1987, 12.29)
This mental quietude may well be the phenomenal signature of not-knowing and of uncertainty, coupled with a highly developed tolerance of ambiguity; and it may be intimately related to the ability to formulate a question or identify a problem while refraining from giving a solution.
What we can see now, especially by contrasting this point with what we said about intuitions earlier, is how mental quietude might be turned into a target for consciousness research in its own right, perhaps even forming a new branch of the psychology or cognitive neuroscience of interdisciplinarity. In particular, the mental state cultivated by the Pyrrhonian skeptics is diametrically opposed to that involved in intuitions. Both are phenomenal states only, and as such have no intrinsic epistemic warrant. However, where intuitions block further inquiry, mental quietude and the phenomenology of uncertainty promote it. The skeptic aims, in a sense, at a state in which inquiry has become permanent.
But there is also an important difference. Whereas intuitions and intuitive plausibility come to us naturally and effortlessly, open mindedness, the suspension of judgment and the tolerance of ambiguity are the result of careful cultivation, long-term practice, and sustained effort. From a purely evolutionary perspective, uncertainty and a non-judgmental attitude are costly and perhaps even dangerous, because they do not motivate action in the same immediate, quick, and unreflected way as intuitions.[8] If on encountering a bear in the wilderness you take too much time to contemplate the nature of the threat (or to question your intuitive assessment that the bear is indeed a threat), you might be eaten before you come to a conclusion. Cleary, introducing the Pyrrhonian spirit to such practical, everyday situations is absurd and perhaps even unhealthy. However, in the context of philosophical and scientific inquiry, cultivating vulnerability of the epistemic type (cf. Chinnery 2014) might be a strength and might help prepare the ground for genuine collaboration and fruitful discourse. But we can now also understand why, even in science, open mindedness is so frustratingly difficult to sustain: mental quietude is not a state of passivity or mental inertia. It is a mental ability that requires constant alertness and a lifetime of practice.
If open mindedness indeed draws from the same ideals as are rooted in Pyrrhonian skepticism, how can we put these insights to work in investigating phenomenal states and tackling the problem of subjectivity? In contemporary philosophy of mind, the problem of subjectivity is often taken to be the main conceptual and methodological obstacle for a true science of the mind. Can the first-person perspective be naturalized? What, exactly, is the place of subjectivity in the scientific world-view? And is there really something like “first-person data” that can—and perhaps must—enter the process of constructing a truly comprehensive theory of the conscious mind? Questions of this kind are good examples of high-level theoretical issues that require the epistemic virtues associated with an open mind. Even the editors of this collection have a tendency to disagree on this question—and we hope that this disagreement is of a constructive sort.
One of us (TM) thinks that a greater practical openness to so-called “first-person methods” on the part of researchers in philosophy and cognitive science alike might lead to great heuristic fecundity and would, perhaps dramatically, improve the quality and efficiency of research. Many such methods can be seen as the cultivation of a set of abilities that increase mental autonomy (M-autonomy; Metzinger 2013b, 2013d) and establish the inner preconditions for critical, rational thought: by stabilizing the first-person perspective, they create a more robust “epistemic agent model” (EAM; Metzinger 2013a, Box 1; Metzinger 2013d), or the experience of being a knowing self. At the same time he holds that there simply are no “first-person data” in any strict or conceptually more rigorous sense. Seriously assuming the existence of such data rests on an extended usage of a concept that is only well-defined in another (namely, scientific) context. First, the whole concept of a “first-person perspective” is just a visuo-grammatical metaphor, without a theory to back it up—and currently we simply don’t know what that could be, namely what “a” first-person perspective would look like (for a first conceptual differentiation, see Metzinger 2003, 2004; Blanke & Metzinger 2009). Second, “data” are extracted from the physical world by technical measuring devices, in a public procedure that is well-defined and well-understood, replicable, and improvable; and which is necessarily intersubjective. But in introspecting our own minds we never have any truly direct or immediate access to a mysterious class of “subjective facts”—all we have are neural correlates and publicly observable reports (which need not be verbal). Speaking of “first-person data” rests on an extended usage of a concept that is only well-defined in another context of application, rhetorically exploiting a fallacy of equivocation. “Data” are typically (though not always) gathered with the help of technical measuring devices (and not individual brains) and by groups of people who mutually control and criticize each other’s methods of data-gathering (namely, by large scientific communities). In particular, data are gathered in the context of rational theories aiming at ever better predictions, theories that—as opposed to phenomenological reports—are open to falsification.
To be sure, autophenomenological reports, theory-contaminated as they may be, are themselves highly valuable and can certainly be treated as data. But the experience “itself” cannot. However, even if one presupposes this rather straightforward view, having an open mind certainly also means acknowledging the additional fact that, for various reasons, this cannot be the whole story. It would be intellectually dishonest to deny without argument that what is sometimes called “first-person methods” could have enormous potential in our quest for a rigorous, empirically based theory of the human mind. The question rather is: What exactly is it about these methods that generates the extra epistemic value, if there really is one? It seems clear that not all epistemic virtues are intellectual virtues, and it is striking to note how such methods have played a central role in all cultures and in almost all ancient philosophical traditions of humankind. This is not only true for Asian systems of philosophy. At the very beginning of Western philosophy, Cicero (1971), in the Tusculanae disputationes (II 5), defined philosophy itself as cultura animi, as a way of caring for and cultivating the soul.
The other (JW) thinks that first-person data exist, and that for a true science of the mind, of consciousness and of subjectivity, it is important to acknowledge their existence. First-person data are not, however, to be found in the direct observation of conscious experience—thus far JW and TM are in perfect agreement—but in describing and more properly in reporting it. A first step towards seeing why this is the case is to clearly distinguish first-person reports from general opinions, convictions, or even intuitions about experience. First-person reports, in this view, are the product of (verbal or non-verbal) behaviors conducted with the sincere intent of conveying or recording certain relevant information about a specific experience. They are not mere opinions about what it is typically like for oneself to have a certain kind of experience. They also should not be confused with attempts to generalize from one’s own case to what it is typically like for other people to undergo a given type of experience, or with the practice, occasionally found in academic philosophy of mind, of relying on intuitive judgments or thought experiments to reach general conclusions about the necessary or even typical characteristics of given types of experience.
First-person reports, construed as sincere descriptions of specific and individual experiences, form the data-base of scientific consciousness research. They can be gathered with the help of public methods such as standardized interview techniques or questionnaires, and the data obtained from these reports are open to intersubjective validation (e.g., by using independent raters, different methods of statistical analysis and of scoring the content of reports, and so on). At the same time, this strategy works only against a background of trust that first-person reports can, when gathered under sufficiently ideal reporting conditions, be regarded as trustworthy with respect to the specific experiences they purport to describe. Indeed, assuming at least a subgroup of first-person reports to be trustworthy is a necessary condition of possibility for scientific consciousness research, for methodological reasons (see Windt 2013, 2015).[9]
Much of the serious work, in this view, will consist in identifying and improving the appropriate conditions under which maximally accurate experience reports can be obtained. Seen in this manner, the trustworthiness of first-person reports becomes, to a considerable degree, a methodological problem for empirical research, not a principled philosophical or conceptual one, and the contribution of philosophy consists, at best, in showing why this is the case (again, see Windt 2013; for critical discussion, see Solomonova et al. 2014). By contrast, principled distrust in first-person reports, or even the attempt to investigate the phenomenology of experience independently of first-person reports, is an obstacle to a true science of consciousness.
While we, the editors, may disagree on the trustworthiness and epistemic status of first-person reports or even on the existence of first-person data in a strict sense, we certainly agree about the need to take our own subjective experience seriously, and we also agree that the epistemic stance we call “open mindedness” may well include a need to cultivate familiarity with our own subjective experience. In this respect, our accounts may well be complementary. Readers familiar with contemplative traditions may also have noted that there is a surprisingly direct and often quite literal correspondence between many classical notions such as “withholding judgment”, “mental quietude”, or “ataraxia”, and the practical instructions given by meditation teachers around the world, from different periods and different non-Western systems of philosophy. These notions are not only theoretical concepts—they draw our attention to the fact that there is more than one type of epistemic practice, and that open mindedness may in part be constituted by the set of abilities that connects them (Metzinger 2013c). On a more theoretical level, to have an open mind again means to acknowledge (and not repress) the fact that there may actually be a deep, unresolved ambiguity here, between the need to take subjective experience seriously and the suspension of judgment. In fact, bracketing one’s own folk-psychological or intuitive judgments about experience is part of what it takes to move towards a truly scientific approach to subjective experience. For this reason, open mindedness involves cultivating not only a particular attitude towards one’s beliefs, but also towards oneself as a believer.
A similar tolerance of ambiguity is at play in the attitude of lending equal credence to reports from different subjects, acknowledging inter- and intrasubjective variation in experience, and, ultimately, trying to integrate these reports into a maximally large data-base, while resisting the pull of generalizing from one’s own case or engaging in armchair phenomenology (where this involves pumping intuitions about experience rather than carefully observing and describing what it is like to have particular experiences). We might even say that this strategy of stepping back from one’s own convictions about experience and formulating questions about the phenomenal character or the subjectivity of experience is in keeping with the Pyrrhonian spirit: both are directed at academic disputes and assume commonplace experience or individual experience reports to be trustworthy, and both strive towards a confrontation of theoretical statements with real-world counterexamples, with the aim of ultimately giving rise to more sophisticated theories.
The issue of subjectivity is an excellent example of a persevering problem that comes in many different guises and reappears on many different levels. Perhaps there really is something about the conscious mind that cannot be explained reductively, even in principle. But searching for a maximally parsimonious scientific explanation is a rational research heuristic, not an ideology. It should never be a substitute for religion, and as such it carries it with it no immediate metaphysical commitments. To have an open mind is an epistemic stance, which means that epistemic progress is what counts in the end. Many of the authors in this collection, including the editors, are staunch methodological naturalists, because they view philosophy and science as engaged in essentially the same enterprise, pursuing similar ends and using similar methods. If it could be shown, however, more precisely than ever before in the history of philosophy and science, that there are strictly irreducible aspects of the human mind, then most of the authors in this collection, and indeed most researchers in this field, would be satisfied with this result. They would have what they wanted all along: epistemic progress.