On Closed Minds

Pivoting from the dangers of curiosity—the unrestrained desire to know all things—this week our Philosophical Happy Hour takes up the opposite vice: the closed and uninquiring mind.

We all likely know a person or two (or twenty) who seem never to change their minds.  Just this past Friday, I was reminded of my dissertation director’s obduracy.  His gravestone (which I just visited again in Latrobe, PA) bears a quote from Fr. Ralph Austin Powell, O.P: “Well John, I must say, you’re not always right, and not always wrong, but never uncertain.”  (There was more complexity to his character than the caricature, but the caricature is funny because it is generally accurate.)

Yet this raises an interesting set of questions: are certainty and the virtues of honest inquiry opposed to one another?

Impediments to Inquiry

The American philosopher—known in part for helping (though under many dubious interpretations) found pragmaticism, and more properly for being the father of semiotics—Charles Sanders Peirce was an advocate for the freedom to inquire.  As he writes in his 1898 essay, “The First Rule of Logic”:

Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy,

Do not block the way of inquiry.

The line has become something of a rally cry—almost a meme—amongst Peircean semioticians.  Somewhat less well-known are the “four familiar shapes in which this venomous error assails our knowledge”, which Peirce details in the following two pages.  To give my own adumbration of these, they are:

first, by an absolute certainty of one’s own knowledge;

second, by positing the object as intrinsically unknowable;

third, by stating that this or that fact is inexplicable;

and fourth by holding some law or truth as having attained a perfect and complete formulation.^[1]

I believe we may find a great many persons conforming themselves today to these “familiar shapes”—and not only amongst the “uneducated”, but quite commonly among those in possession of college educations, masters, and doctorates. 

Conviction: Sign of a Resolute or a Closed Mind?

And yet, rallied though we may be to the call of free inquiry, it seems that too free an inquiry results in a mind lacking all conviction.  What point is there to inquiry, in other words, if it leads us to no place of solid ground?

There seems something of a paradox, perhaps, lurking in Peirce’s adamant exhortation to leave the way to inquiry open.  He seems rather convinced, that is—as though the way to inquiry itself could not be challenged.  This is of course a kind of cheap paradox, but it may get us thinking nonetheless: what convictions, if any—and why—should be held firmly?  What does it mean to hold a conviction firmly?  Does that necessarily preclude inquiry?

Many often misattribute to G.K. Chesterton the quote that “Tolerance is the virtue of the man who lacks convictions.”  Spurious though the quote is, we do admire those who have convictions—in some sense, even the wrong ones—in contrast to the lukewarm.  If you do not believe in something as true or noble, if you do not have a mind that has closed upon something as good and worthy of pursuit over other goods, you will be neither a good leader nor friend.

Minds at Inquiry

• What distinguishes a mind firmly possessed of truth from one simply closed to further inquiry?  Is or can certainty itself ever become an intellectual vice?
• Peirce seems to warn against holding anything as absolutely certain.  But might some certainties actually be necessary for inquiry to proceed?  Can everything remain perpetually open to question?
• Of Peirce’s four impediments to inquiry, which seems most prevalent today?  Are some more pernicious than others?
• To what extent are our convictions the products of reasoned inquiry, and to what extent are they established through mere familiarity, extrinsic authority, or the peer pressure of a social group?
• What does genuine intellectual humility require?  Does a willingness to question our convictions entail an openness to abandoning them?
• Can the desire to keep an open mind itself become an impediment to attaining truth?  At what point must inquiry come to a resolution—for the sake of action, for the sake of one’s own mind?

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[1] See The Essential Peirce, vol.2: 48-50.  As an aside, correlative with these four impediments to inquiry, I believe we could also identify the deficient modes of “affixing” our beliefs, identified in Peirce’s earlier work of 1877: those modes of tenacity, authoritative, and a prioristic holding.