What Is an Open Mind

Contents

1. The advice, stated fairly
2. Three cases the phrase cannot hold
3. The neighbours
4. The quantifier read for itself
5. A lean is named or unnamed
6. “I’m impartial” is a report from the quotient
7. The tempting repair: balance
8. What the advice can still mean
9. Who can read a lean
10. What it does not mean
11. What it costs
12. An ordinary Tuesday

The phrase is handed out at the start of almost every hard conversation. A judge says it to a jury. A manager says it to herself before she hears the two sides of a dispute. A friend says it to you before you tell him something he has already suspected. Keep an open mind. Its companions are said about oneself: I’m impartial. I have no dog in this fight. I’m only here to listen. Each of them reports the same thing — that the speaker stands at no angle to the matter in hand.

The picture underneath is simple, and mostly kind. A mind is a scale. Prejudices, preferences and interests are weights that have been set on one pan. An open mind is a scale with the weights off, ready to tip whichever way the evidence presses; impartiality is the scale found level; having no dog in the fight is having no weight of interest to begin with. On this picture the work of reading fairly is subtraction: find what you are leaning toward, take it off, and read.

There is something right in this, and it should be kept. People do read differently once they have decided. A juror who made up her mind at the opening statement reads the next three weeks differently from one who did not, and the room can usually tell. The advice is pointing at a difference between two readers that can be seen. The question is whether the difference is the one the picture names — leaning against not leaning. Three ordinary cases suggest it is not.

Three cases the phrase cannot hold

The seam is the same in all three. Each person looked inside for a lean, came back empty-handed, and took the result to describe their position. The phrase rests on looking inside as the test, and reads an empty result as the state it names. In each case somebody else, reading the same record, could see a tilt the reader could not. That is the fact the scale picture cannot hold: a reader’s report of no lean and an observer’s report of a lean, both honest, about one and the same reading.

The neighbours

This ground has been walked near before, on this site, and the nearest neighbours need naming first.

The essay The Lens Attention Looks Through, written outside this series, is the nearest. It says that we cannot simply decide to have no lens, that even the wish for objectivity is a lens, and that the counterpractice is not blankness but calibration: noticing the lens as lens. That is where this piece starts, and it is not argued again. That essay is about attention, and about what a person is shaped to notice. This one takes up something it does not: the three phrases people say about themselves, why the inward check for a lean comes back empty, the difference between a stake and an orientation, the repair by balance, and who else can read a lean. Three pieces in this series — What Is a Language, What Is a Compromise and What Is a Queue — have each taken it as given that no reading is neutral, and this one starts from that too. The question here is what the advice can still mean once a view from nowhere is not available.

Two things are left where they are. The piece on agreement owns the case in which many readers share an orientation, and “everyone in the field agrees” is read there. And What Is My Truth owns the other half of this subject: that there is one past for readings to be readings of, so that the absence of a view from nowhere does not turn into the claim that every account is as good as another. Two earlier essays, written before the foundation was set down, reached this word by a different road. They are taken up in the sources, one of them as superseded.

The quantifier read for itself

I work from a small set of numbered primitives and results derived from them. The result doing the work today is R14: every idea is biased toward itself — orientation and prejudice, always together. The foundation derives it from its compass, S3: two axes, four poles, and on the circle every direction has an opposite. An idea at one direction is an orientation toward it. The same fact is a prejudice against the direction opposite. The foundation does not treat these as two traits that happen to coincide. It says they come together, and the foundation says the result holds of itself too.

Most of what this series has said about R14 has been said about its first half — ideas are biased — either as a caveat, and so is this one, or as the non-neutrality of a reading. Today it is read at the word after the dash. Always together. No orientation without a prejudice against its antipode, and no prejudice without an orientation. If that holds, the question about an open mind stops being how much lean a person carries. It becomes whether a reader can be a reader with no orientation at all, and I can find nothing in the foundation that offers that.

Three more pieces of the foundation need to be in the open. The first is P8: a condition is prior to what it conditions, and where a person’s naming is itself conditioned, that person is not its origin. Ideas have people; people do not have ideas. A reader is under the ideas that have her. She is not above them, sorting through. The second is P7: an idea is a named condition, and naming does not create it; naming makes the relationship conscious. What naming changes is whether the relation can be read by the person in it. It does not change the condition. The third is P4 with R8. In the Reality Equation, R = A / E, the expectation E comprises subconscious prediction and ideas, and the human experiences only the quotient. The ideas are in the denominator. The denominator is not what is felt.

One more thing from the foundation’s account of acts and artifacts, which is not a numbered result but is a locked definition. An artifact is a mark, and a mark carries a magnitude and a phase. The phase is fixed by which idea has the actualizer, not by the mark and not by the maker. A verdict written in notes, a piece of advice given to two friends, a bar of evidence set for a claim: each is a mark, and each therefore has a phase.

The question is not how much you lean. It is whether the lean has been named.

A lean is named or unnamed

Take the juror’s notes. The note that reads nervous beside one witness and evasive beside the other is a mark. It has a phase, and the phase belongs to whichever idea had her when she wrote it. She had no word for that idea at the time, which is why it went unfelt. If she had a word for it — I read warmth as honesty, say — the relation would be conscious, and the note could be read back against it. The lean would be the same lean. What would differ is that she could see it standing there.

“I’m impartial” is a report from the quotient

Why did the juror’s inward check come back empty? Because of where the lean sits. A lean that is a term in the denominator is not met as a lean. It is met as the way the situation is. The juror did not feel herself read nerves into one witness and evasion into the other. She felt a witness who was nervous and a witness who was evasive. Looking inside for a lean is looking through the quotient for something that is in its denominator, and R8 says the quotient is all that is experienced.

This clears the three people of dishonesty, and it is meant to. It also takes their reports out of the evidence. Sincerity, however complete, cannot be the test of an open mind, because the test is being run from the one position that does not show the thing tested.

The third phrase deserves a paragraph of its own, because it is the one that can be literally true. A dog in a fight is a stake. The adviser in case two has none. What R14 ties to an idea is not a stake but an orientation, and an orientation does not need anything to be gained. He has no stake and has an angle. The phrase welds the two together, and claiming the first, honestly, can be heard as claiming the second.

The tempting repair: balance

There is an obvious repair, and the two earlier essays both reach for versions of it. If every idea has an opposite, then a mind equally hospitable to an idea and its opposite would lean neither way. The leans cancel, and the scale is level. This is the most attractive version of the open mind, and it needs a careful reading, because the foundation’s wording is narrower than the picture.

R14 attaches the bias to the idea. Every idea is biased toward itself. A host who holds an idea and its antipode holds two ideas, each biased toward itself and each prejudiced against the other. Whether the pair adds up to a position of no lean — whether the resultant of a host’s ideas is itself a stance — is a question the foundation as it stands does not answer. This piece does not answer it either. It does not need to, for a second reason.

The juror had balanced the two sides she could name. She had weighed the plaintiff’s case and the defendant’s with care, and had stood ready to tip. What tipped her was not on either pan. It was the unnamed lean that read hesitation one way for one speaker and the other way for the second. Balance among the named does nothing about it, because it is not among the named.

What the advice can still mean

If the lean cannot be taken off, the advice has to be about something else, and the foundation offers one candidate. P5: the host can occupy a position from which its response to a readable condition is revisable. Two words in it matter here. Readable: a condition has to have become readable, and P7 says naming is how. Revisable: it is the response that can be revised. P5 does not say the lean can be removed. It says that a response to a condition that has been read can still be changed.

Put the two together and the advice has a followable version. An open mind is a position, not a state. It is a lean the reader has named, and a response to what she is shown that is still revisable. It is not I have no angle. It is I know which angle I am reading from, and what you show me can still change what I do.

This is a smaller thing than the phrase promises, and it can be carried out. A person can say, before a meeting, which way she is inclined and why. A person can say what a reading would have to show for her to respond differently. Neither is the removal of a lean. Both change the reader’s relation to one, which is the part the foundation says can change.

Who can read a lean

R14 says what a lean is prejudiced against: its antipode. The foundation’s own account of a reading taken from a condition, which the piece on taste sets out, is that it is accurate about fidelity to that condition and prejudiced against the opposite one, by the same act. Read as a statement about what a reader is least placed to see, it yields something the subtraction picture cannot reach.

This is, I think, what the working institutions of impartiality do, and they do it without removing anyone’s lean. A recusal takes a reader with a stake out of the room. A disclosure puts the lean on the record, where someone who does not share it can read it. Opposing counsel puts a reader at the opposite angle into the room. Peer review hands marks to readers who did not make them. None of them makes anybody level. Each makes a lean readable by somebody who does not hold it. These are the ordinary institutions, named here as illustration. The argument stands without them.

What it does not mean

It does not mean that all readings are equal. The foundation’s evaluative question, R11, is fidelity and not success, and a reading can be more or less faithful to what it reads, whatever angle it is read from. No reader is at no angle. That does not erase the difference between a faithful reading and an unfaithful one, and the piece on my truth says why there is something to be faithful to.

It does not turn you’re biased into a discovery. That sentence is true of the person saying it, so on its own it carries no information, and said as an accusation it is empty. The question that carries information is toward what, and then has it been named. The first can be answered about anyone. The second can be answered only about someone who has tried.

It does not make the people in the three cases frauds. The juror, the adviser and the reviewer reported what they felt, accurately. And it does not say that naming a lean is easy or finishes the work. Understanding that a lean cannot be felt does not make it felt, and some leans will stay unnamed after honest effort. The claim is smaller than that: the effort is aimed at the right thing.

What it costs

It costs the self-certificate. There is no place to look to confirm that you are open-minded, and nobody else can issue the certificate either, since their reports of you are made from an angle too. It costs the clean exit from an argument. I’m just being objective goes, and so does its mirror, you’re just biased. It costs the idea that open-mindedness is a trait a person has. On this reading it is a relation between a reader, a named lean and a response, and a relation is kept up or it lapses.

It costs something for anyone whose work depends on being believed impartial. The honest form of that claim is here is my angle, and here are the marks; read them from yours. That is weaker as a credential and stronger as evidence.

And it costs this piece the same price. The foundation I am reading from is an idea, and prejudiced against its antipode like any other. In the spirit of the argument, here is the lean I know of in what I have written: I read toward the view that advice which cannot be carried out should be replaced rather than repeated. Someone who values the phrase as a courtesy, said at the start of a difficult conversation to make room for the other person, will read the same marks from a different place, and may see what I have not.

An ordinary Tuesday

These are practice and not grounds. They are revisable on evidence, and the foundation holds that the human is the site of conscious responsibility for what is made (R13). What remains answerable is the response.

1. Say the angle, not the absence. Before the hard meeting, write one sentence naming what you are inclined toward and why. I lean toward the proposal that is cheaper to explain. That is the naming P7 describes, done in a minute.
2. Say what would change your response. Write down what a reading would have to show for you to respond differently, and who could show it. If you cannot, the response is not currently revisable, and that is worth knowing before the meeting.
3. Hand the same marks to someone who leans the other way. Ask what they see. Do not ask whether you were fair. The second question is answered from inside the quotient.
4. Answer “you’re biased” with “toward what?” And mean it as a question. When you are the one saying it, say the toward.
5. Compare your bars. When two claims have been held to different standards of evidence, write both bars down beside what each cost. The reviewer in case three could have seen her own.