Getting to Open-Mindedness: The Rational Subject and Barriers of Bias to Social Action

• In Event: 52.084 - Roundtable Session 20
  In Roundtable Session: 52.084-6 - Knowledge and Knowing in Education

Abstract

In matters of schooling the social aspects of knowledge have been salient in relating the students’ cultural background to rigorous and critical thinking. This paper focuses on a Baehr’s, personal worth conception of intellectual virtue in terms of whether open-mindedness can better intellectually equip students to critically engage their cultural beliefs and those of others. On this view, students’ possession of group identity or identities (e.g. race/ethnicity, gender) must be transcended to achieve an aperspectival stance in reasoning. Can intellectual virtues in principle help students weigh group identity in their evaluation of beliefs specifically and in acquiring knowledge? I offer a critique of his formulation regarding how it accommodates group identity in terms of its limitations in exposing cultural bias

Author

• Sheron Andrea Fraser-Burgess, Ball State University