When first studying a point of view

It is comfortable to be right, to believe that your views are unassailable. Therefor the path of least resistance for the mind is to latch on to the first cogent (or sometimes not) view of things that it encounters and assume it is the correct one. The common man will then waltz through life without ever having to do any heavy mental lifting again since he is already in the right and other views can be dismissed out of hand. SO how does the thoughtful person avoid this seemingly universal instinct?

It may be impossible to completely avoid, but one can try and lay the psychological groundwork to protect (at least to some extent) new thoughts as they are encountered. I found one such mechanism that has been extremely useful to me while taking a philosophy course at DBU some years ago. I'm afraid I've lost the exact phrasing of Dr. Todd Kappelman's admonition, but I came away from the course with this maxim. Deny nothing and accept little, but make a distinction between more and less likely. And so one may proceed to examine and consider a thought or point of view as thoroughly as possible with less interference from our innate bigotry .

Conservative friends, calm yourselves. This in no way calls into question the fact that there are real truths and real fallacies. It simply questions our ability to know them at a glance. The maxim is not a call toward the moral amnesty of philosophy so much as a call to humility for the philosopher.

Shackles of the Mind

The mind is adaptable to almost any challenge, except that of self limitation. When you confess to be unable, a gate closes in the mind, barring adaptation to the problem.

To say "i can't" is to make it so.

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