If I’m being honest…
I’ll admit that I have to resist an all-too-human tendency that, if ignored, could seriously compromise any intellectual endeavor I undertake. It’s a tendency we all have; regardless of whatever else we are—intellectual, artist, technician, athlete, civil servant, schoolkid—we’re humans first, and among other tendencies we have, we share a proclivity for the Anti-Scientific Method. We’re constantly tempted to cherry-pick the evidence to support what we want to believe. We have more than one reason for that. For those of us engaged in intellectual pursuits, the temptation frequently stems from ego—from the desire to prove ourselves rather than prove—or disprove—a hypothesis or theory. I notice this in myself when I notice that encountering any piece of evidence that may conflict with a hypothesis or theory I’ve already reached—especially if it’s one I’ve supported in print—makes me squirm and want to look away, or convince myself that it’s wrong. This is an opportunity to go exactly in the opposite direction—not to shrink from that piece of evidence, but to really dig into it. Not to look away because it might pose a threat to something I already believe, but to examine it more closely for that very reason. Regardless of whether you do history, or biology, or life on a Tuesday, paying special attention to evidence that appears to challenge your assumptions is a core skill for a well-lived life, both as a private person and as a citizen-participant.
What makes this a bit tricky is that we do, actually, have to discipline our curiosity to function. We can’t always just let it lead us wherever it will, whenever it will, with no overarching purpose. When we’re small children, we do that, but we have adults to supply the discipline externally, so we don’t try to grab a rattlesnake or experiment with whether fire burns. If we manage to produce anything with our abilities and energies, we do that by focusing and channeling those abilities and energies—including curiosity—toward an identified objective. The trick is to allow our curiosity free rein within the confines of the pursuit of that objective. If I’m working on a book about developments in wagon design in 18th-century Europe, I can’t allow my curiosity to deep-dive into Ptolemaic astronomy—at least, not while I’m “at work.” At the same time, though, if I’ve about decided that this axle design originated in Saxony and then I read in a credible source that the same design was in earlier use in Brittany, my job is to pay attention to that, and to keep looking for more evidence—not to dismiss it and go with my prior assumption, even if I’ve published my prior assumption. It sounds so simple and obvious written like this, but it’s harder to do in real life, because it requires resisting a pretty strong impulse. If someone asked me what my most significant inherent intellectual limitation was, I would say it’s the tendency to make up my mind about how something is—based on careful thought, yes, but nobody’s “careful thought” is comprehensive—and strongly resist any suggestion that I might be wrong. It takes effort to put intellectual integrity over egoistic self-aggrandizement.
It's obvious that this applies more broadly than to scholarship. Whether we’re fully aware of it or not, I think we feel so much respect for someone who admits they were wrong and clearly states the reasons why they changed their mind because we know how hard that is. It’s a transcendence of a limiting default setting in our brains.
My doctoral supervisor and I agreed years ago that there was an unfortunate tendency in historical monographs produced by emerging scholars to overstate their cases, to the detriment of otherwise-solid work. If I’m reading a work of scholarship that pays explicit attention to the limitations of the argument, the possible holes in the argument that future work might reveal, or even a discussion of evidence that doesn’t seem to support the argument, and what the author has to say about that, I’m automatically going to respect that author and that work more—and I’m going to trust them more.
A well-tuned mind can discipline curiosity to pursue an objective, but at the same time give that curiosity free rein to explore any and all potentially-valid exceptions or contradictions to whatever tentative or provisional guesses or even conclusions we might draw along the way. In the end, we have to produce something, and we should produce that something—whether it’s a book, or a financial decision, or a parenting decision, or a vote—having done the best we can in the time we have, but with the understanding that we could be wrong—at least to some extent. The final product of our mental effort is never really final. There is always more to learn. The trick is to embrace that, rather than be threatened by it. I’m still working on that.