Open-mindedness appears as a potential intellectual virtue from the beginning of the rise of the literature on intellectual virtues. It often takes up a special role, sometimes thought of as a meta-virtue rather than a first-order virtue: as an ingredient that makes other virtues virtuous. Jason Baehr has attempted to give a unified account of open-mindedness as an intellectual virtue. He argues that the conceptual core of open-mindedness lies in the fact that a person departs, moves beyond, or transcends a certain default cognitive standpoint. Two of his main aims are to show that (1) one does not need to assume a doxastic conflict or disagreement to be at the heart of open-mindedness—that is, there are also instances where the virtue of open-mindedness is needed when there is no opposing view to be considered—and (2) that not all forms of open-mindedness include rational assessment—that is, sometimes being open-minded is not about weighing evidence for and against a claim. So, his main aim is to show that there are various situations that afford open-mindedness, in each of which a slightly different kind of open-mindedness is called for. To unify all these different kinds of open-mindedness is then the goal of his work. He arrives at the following definition of open-mindedness (OM): an open-minded person is characteristically (a) willing and (within limits) able (b) to transcend a default cognitive standpoint (c) in order to take up or take seriously the merits of (d) a distinct cognitive standpoint. In this article, I take seriously Baehr’s suggestion of how to understand open-mindedness as an intellectual virtue and argue that the crux lies in formulating how we can be able to transcend a default cognitive standpoint. This is not as obvious as it has been taken to be in the literature on open-mindedness. Biases, overconfidence, and wishful thinking are difficult exactly because we don’t know that we are engaging in them. That is, they are systematically hidden from our consciousness, otherwise they would not be a bias, overconfidence, or wishful thinking. Hence, the crux of making open-mindedness open-minded is to see how it is possible to make something of one’s own mind visible that is systematically hidden from oneself. I argue that this problem can be solved by looking at research on attention. I base my considerations in this article on Sebastian Watzl’s account of attention, which essentially holds that paying attention is an activity of foregrounding and backgrounding mental contents. That is, attention is the activity of structuring mental contents into a priority structure of foreground and background. If I pay attention to the scene in front of me, I foreground the black letters on my screen, and I background the coffee cup next to them. In this way, I create a priority structure between the letters (as they appear to me) and the coffee cup (as it appears to me). I argue that what allows us to make something of our own mind visible that is systematically hidden from us is a special way of paying attention, hence a special way of foregrounding and backgrounding the involved mental contents. That is, the crux of what enables us to transcend a default cognitive standpoint, the conceptual core of open-mindedness, is a special kind of attention, which I will call ‘open-minded attention’ (OMA). The claim of this article is not that open-minded attention fully describes the virtue of open-mindedness (OMA is not sufficient for open-mindedness). Rather, what I try to show is that in all cases of open-mindedness it turns out that open-minded attention is the necessary component that ensures that we can indeed get rid of prior biases, that is, transcend also those implicit beliefs and expectations that are systematically hidden from us (OMA is necessary for open-mindedness).

中文翻译：

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开放思想的美德是一种关注的美德

从关于智力美德的文献兴起之初，开放思想就作为一种潜在的智力美德而出现。它常常扮演着特殊的角色，有时被认为是一种元美德，而不是一阶美德：作为使其他美德成为美德的成分。贾森·贝尔 (Jason Baehr) 试图对开放思想作为一种智力美德做出统一的解释。他认为，开放性的概念核心在于人脱离、超越或超越某种默认的认知立场。他的两个主要目的是表明（1）人们不需要假设一种信念冲突或分歧是开放思想的核心——也就是说，在某些情况下，也需要开放思想的美德。没有反对的观点需要考虑——并且（2）并非所有形式的开放思想都包括理性评估——也就是说，有时开放思想并不是权衡支持或反对某个主张的证据。因此，他的主要目的是表明，有多种情况可以提供开放的思想，每种情况都需要稍微不同的开放思想。将所有这些不同类型的开放思想统一起来就是他工作的目标。他得出了开放思想（OM）的以下定义：思想开放的人具有以下特征：（a）愿意并且（在一定限度内）能够（b）超越默认的认知立场（c）以便接受或接受认真对待（d）独特认知立场的优点。在这篇文章中，我认真对待贝尔关于如何将开放思想理解为一种智力美德的建议，并认为关键在于阐明我们如何能够超越默认的认知立场。这并不像关于开放思想的文献中所认为的那么明显。偏见、过度自信和一厢情愿的想法是很困难的，因为我们不知道自己正在参与这些事情。也就是说，它们系统地隐藏在我们的意识之外，否则它们就不会是偏见、过度自信或一厢情愿。因此，使思想开放的关键是要看看如何才能使自己内心系统地隐藏的某些东西变得可见。我认为这个问题可以通过关注注意力的研究来解决。我在本文中的考虑基于 Sebastian Watzl 对注意力的阐述，该观点本质上认为注意力是一种将心理内容置于前景和背景中的活动。也就是说，注意力是将心理内容构建为前景和背景的优先结构的活动。如果我注意眼前的场景，我会将屏幕上的黑色字母放在前景中，并将它们旁边的咖啡杯放在背景中。通过这种方式，我在字母（在我看来）和咖啡杯（在我看来）之间创建了一个优先级结构。我认为，使我们能够使我们自己的思想中那些系统地隐藏起来的东西变得可见的是一种特殊的关注方式，因此是一种将所涉及的心理内容置于前景和背景中的特殊方式。也就是说，使我们能够超越默认认知立场的关键，即开放思想的概念核心，是一种特殊的注意力，我将其称为“开放思想注意力”（OMA）。本文的主张并不是开放性关注充分描述了开放性的美德（OMA 不足以描述开放性）。相反，我试图表明的是，在所有开放思想的情况下，事实证明，开放思想的注意力是确保我们确实能够摆脱先验偏见的必要组成部分，也就是说，超越那些隐含的信念和期望系统地对我们隐藏的东西（OMA 对于开放思想是必要的）。