Against Open-Minded Engagement (for Some People)
This chapter argues that you shouldn’t engage open-mindedly with salient counterarguments in some standard situations—those standard situations in which you know that the counterarguments are misleading. This conclusion relies on a general principle: you should do the things that what you know is a decisive reason to do (a principle that has been used to argue for so-called “pragmatic encroachment” in epistemology). That a counterargument is misleading is a decisive reason, in standard situations, to be unwilling to reduce your confidence in response to the counterargument. Therefore, if you know that the counterargument is misleading—which you sometimes do—you should do exactly that. You should be unwilling to reduce your confidence in response to the counterargument and, therefore, you should be closed-minded toward it.