Open-mindedness and epistemic dependence

Résumé

Given the inevitability of our social dependencies, some social epistemologists have defended that dogmatism, rather than open-mindedness, is the more appropriate cognitive habit for laypeople to acquire good beliefs in specialized like the sciences. They claim that dogmatically relying on experts’ deliverances, rather than exercising one’s own intellectual virtues, like open-mindedness, is the best epistemic strategy for maximizing the acquisition of true beliefs and avoiding false ones. In this paper, I challenge this view by arguing that open-mindedness is a valuable epistemic trait for laypeople who seek an appropriate pattern of epistemic dependence concerning scientific theories. While laypeople are generally incapable of fully understanding and evaluating scientific theories – an effort that only properly trained experts can undertake – they can still achieve some level of understanding of these theories. Such understanding is impeded by habits like dogmatism. Conversely, open-mindedness proves beneficial in these contexts as it disposes individuals to engage with and incorporate cognitively challenging ideas, such as many scientific theories.