To act intelligently in human affairs is only possible if an attempt is made to understand the thoughts, motives, and apprehensions of one’s opponent so fully that one can see the world through his eyes.
— Albert Einstein
The educated mind
But this is what intellectual development truly aims for: improving one’s ability to engage the world by learning to think in accordance with reality.
Learning to think in accordance with reality lies even at the basis of the concept of an educated mind. According to educational researcher William Perry (Harvard) an educated mind:
- has learned to think about even his own thoughts,
- it examines the way it orders his data and the assumptions it is making,
- it compares these with other thoughts that other people might have
- and adopts whatever this scrutiny of data, ideas, and opinions decides on as most reliable and productive.
- In doing so the educated mind learned to think in accordance with reality from which position he can take responsibility for his own stand and negotiate – with respect – with others.
The defining characteristic of an educated mind is a habit of examining the own thoughts, comparing them to those of others, and adopt the more reliable and productive. This sounds simple enough, but it involves overcoming that innate protectiveness (irrespective their quality) one feels towards the own thoughts, beliefs, and opinions.
However, if you have acquired the habit of continually examining and improving your thoughts you have developed a mental bullshit filter: a filter that gradually improves the content of your thoughts, beliefs, and opinions and that step by step improves the realism of your thoughts and actions.
Actually formal schooling is not very good in helping its students to acquire an educated mind. The more schools focus on a common core and specified outcome based education, the less room they leave for students to produce any other exam result than a priori specified.
So weirdly enough, an educated mind is most often not the outcome of schooling, but something one acquires (or not) while not engaged in school activities. Thinking about and improving your own thoughts is mostly a private matter. But others play important roles in helping you to produce the precise, clear, and comprehensive thoughts that can replace vague, muddled, and limited ones.
Carrol Quigley’s key feature of Western Society — "The truth unfolds in time through a communal process" — is a leading idea at the School of Thought.
On Correct opinions
At the school of thought there is no correct opinion. But many opinions have limited support, are inconsistent with themselves or with evidence, or exist only in a specific (sub)culture. That makes them weak. But weak opinions may still lead to important insights.
While we have ways to determine that opinions are weak, inconsistent, or unsupported, we have no method to proof that they are correct.
Strong beliefs
However a belief that is consistent under many different perspectives and does not contradicts a wide diversity of evidence is much stronger than a belief that only makes sense from a single perspective or in the absence of real-world evidence.
The School of thought is agnostic on belief systems (religions, ideologies, disciplines), it basically considers them all insightful and productive on the one hand and limited and misleading on the other hand. There exists no thought, no understanding that cannot be deepened or broadened and any closed belief system (eventually) limits the holders intellectual development and real-world effectivity. Hence political correctness, religious dogma, or other (self-)imposed limits on thoughts are not welcome (other than as all too human examples of thoughts open to improvement).
Focus on your own thoughts and values
Compared to the level of control you can develop on your own thoughts, you have very little control over the thoughts of others. Even if you come with the most convincing and irrefutable arguments, others might simply ignore them, only pretend to listen, or interpret them unlike you intended them. Trying to convince others of anything is not your best use of your time.
Instead of focussing on changing the thoughts of others, you can much more effectively use the critical abilities of others– especially, but not exclusively, those of educated thinkers — to improve your own thoughts.
Intellectual humility
This requires some intellectual humility. "Perhaps other people make as much sense as I do, and in domains they are competent in, they might even make more sense." Alternatively you can say to yourself: "I’m not the person who treats people with conflicting opinions as utter morons and deeply misguided. In fact I might be just as or more misguided."
This intellectual humility, has little to do with actual humility. More than anything else, it is an acknowledgment that you take knowledge seriously, irrespective of who acquires or conveys it.