Intellectual responsibility

"Responsible knowers are uneasy about possible inconsistency and incoherence within their own system of knowledge and within "public" systems of knowledge that they are tempted to endorse or inclined to reject. Many of the examples cited at the outset require would-be knowers not to turn aside from, or attempt to explain away, aspects of experience that do not fit with what they can reasonably claim to know."

"If upon thought hang all deliberate activities and the uses we make of all our other powers, Lockes assertion that it is of the highest concernment that care should be taken of its conduct is a moderate statement."

"Primarily, naturally, it is not we who think, in any actively responsible sense; thinking is rather something that happens in us. Only so far as one has acquired control of the method in which the function of suggestion occurs and has accepted responsibility for its consequences, can one truthfully say, "I think so and so."

"By "intellectual responsibility," I did not mean any specific responsibility of intellectuals as such, but first and foremost, the intellectual responsibility of all human beings. The question, therefore, was not about the role of intellectuals in society, but about the attitude towards culture, the relation of individuals to collective heritage, whether in Africa or, for that matter, in any part of the world. The question, in other words, was this: Why, in what sense, to what extent cant we help identifying with the values and thoughts developed by our foreparents? What are the effects of such identification? How far does it contribute to personal and collective creativity and freedom? When does it, conversely, start being counter-productive? No one should hide behind his/her people or traditions, or rely on them to think on his/her behalf. No one should deny his/her paternity or parenthood over ideas h/she expresses and positively asserts. No one should stubbornly stick to such ideas once clearly refuted. I believe there is a minimum, universal ethics of thought, without which no communication would ever be possible among humans. But I also believe this ethics is constantly challenged, in all cultures, by different forms and kinds of sophistry. In this respect, no culture holds any kind of monopoly over either universalism or relativism. These are, instead, two poles of a tension inherent to all cultures. Philosophy is the name given, in Western languages, to the systematic development of the first pole and the borderline discourses thereby generated."

"Theology has borrowed, and coloured for her own use, the principles which were first brought into vogue in politics. If in the one field it is the fashion to consider convenience first and truth second, in the other there is a corresponding fashion of placing truth second and emotional comfort first."

"The political spirit is the great force in throwing love of truth and accurate reasoning into a secondary place."

"They who tamper with veracity, from whatever motive, are tampering with the vital force of human progress. Our comfort and the delight of the religious imagination are no better than forms of self-indulgence, when they are secured at the cost of that love of truth on which, more than on anything else, the increase of light and happiness among men must depend."

"The view that there is no source of obligation save the claims of individual sentient beings entails that we have no responsibility to anything other than such beings. Most of the relevant sentient individuals are our fellow humans. So talk about our responsibility to Truth, or to Reason, must be replaced by talk about our responsibility to our fellow human beings."

"The contemporary explosion of information—including misinformation—makes intellectual responsibility more needed than ever. But we also need a mean between a dogmatic self-assurance and a disabling fear of conviction. ..."

"The central thing I have aimed to argue for in this chapter is that once you have met your obligation towards reflection, it is impossible for you to have not met your doxastic obligation. This ultimately means that the only relevant duties towards beliefs are our duties to reflect. This is because only by reflecting you will know both what you think you ought to believe and what you ought to believe/what you can non-culpably believe."

"Let us consider the concept of what might be called an "intellectual requirement." We may assume that every person is subject to a purely intellectual requirement—that of trying his best to bring it about that, for every proposition h that he considers, he accepts h if and only if h is true. One might say that this is the persons responsibility or duty qua intellectual being. (But as a requirement it is only a prima facie duty; it may be, and usually is, overridden by others, nonintellectual requirements, and it may be fulfilled more or less adequately.) One way, then, of re-expressing the locution "p is more reasonable than q for S at t" is to say this: "S is so situated at t that his intellectual requirement, his responsibility as an intellectual being, is better fulfilled by p than by q."

"This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained."