Dear all,

We will have our next LIRa session on Thursday, May 6th. Our speaker is Hein Duijf. You can find the details of the talk below. We will use our recurring zoom link: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/92907704256?pwd=anY3WkFmQVhLZGhjT2JXMlhjQVl1dz09 (Meeting ID: 929 0770 4256, Passcode: 036024).

Speaker: Hein Duijf

Date and Time: Thursday, May 6th 2021, 16:30-18:00, Amsterdam time.

Venue: online.

Title: Should one be open-minded?

Abstract. I investigate the common intuition that open-mindedness is virtuous, while its opposite – close-mindedness – is vicious. I defend a positive claim that open-mindedness sometimes helps us achieve some basic epistemic goals. However, I also defend a negative claim that open-mindedness sometimes hinders the achievement of some basic epistemic goals. Open-mindedness is only epistemically beneficial if one has decent evaluative skills. These evaluative skills can be understood in several ways: as the social skill to determine whether another person is trustworthy or has mutual interests; or as the evaluative skill to determine whether certain argument or piece of evidence is truth-conducive. In the absence of sufficient evaluative skills and for low degrees of open mindedness, it seems plausible that open-mindedness will not be epistemically fruitful.

Hope to see you there!

The LIRa team