tl;dr
- ‘Open-mindedness’ as a property of individuals does not exist. However, ‘opening your mind’, as an action, does exist.
- Opening your mind requires active engagement with foreign ideas, which results in either accepting them, rejecting them, or delaying judgement.
- Previously accepted or rejected ideas can be reconsidered, which is also an example of opening.
- You can’t open your mind generically — it always happens with respect to concrete ideas.
- Accepting and rejecting ideas is part of constructing your identity by creating a distinction between the inside (the accepted) and the outside (the rejected).
- Accepting a new idea may require rejecting previously held ideas in order to avoid cognitive dissonance.
- There is a cost to holding too many things in a state of ‘delayed judgement’ because it impedes the construction of a coherent self that is able to relate to others and make conscious choices.
- There is a trade-off between your ability to act with intention (which requires stability) and your ability to actively engage with foreign ideas (which destabilizes, at least partially and temporarily).
- People vary in how stable they need their boundary to be in order to feel safe and comfortable.
- I suppose you could call people who are comfortable with a low stability threshold ‘open-minded’. But I’m not sure if that’s how the term is commonly understood.
Okay, that’s it. There is no article.
