The Vice of Close-Mindedness

5min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The vice that we're talking about in this case is closed-mindedness. The director of military intelligence in Israel had all the evidence necessary to know that an attack was about to happen He failed to know it. Why did he fail to know it because he ignored the evidence? Because he had already made up his mind and was closed-minded. That's what I call a vice explanation An explanation of how things turned out.

All of us have been wrong about things from time to time. But sometimes it was a simple, forgivable mistake, while other times we really should have been correct. Properties that systematically prevent us from being correct, and for which we can legitimately be blamed, are “intellectual vices.” Examples might include closed-mindedness, wishful thinking, overconfidence, selective attention, and so on. Quassim Cassam is a philosopher who studies knowledge in various forms, and who has recently written a book Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political. We talk about the nature of intellectual vices, how they manifest in people and in organizations, and what we can possibly do to correct them in ourselves.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Quassim Cassam received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Oxford University. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He previously held faculty positions at Cambridge University and University College London. He has served as the president of the Aristotelian Society, and was awarded a Leadership Fellowship by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.