The Work of Changing Your Mind
Article by Ayman Fouad Abdelgawad
Changing a view has a social cost. Someone may remind us of what we said before, as though the earlier sentence were a contract that forbids further thought.
Consistency is useful when it means applying a standard fairly. It becomes less useful when it requires loyalty to an error. A person who revises an opinion after encountering better evidence has performed part of the work that serious thinking demands.
The revision should still be explainable. What changed? Was it a new fact, a stronger argument, or recognition of an assumption that had escaped notice? Without that account, flexibility can become another name for convenience.
We could make conversation more honest by receiving a well-explained change of mind without treating it as humiliation. The aim of an argument would then be easier to remember: to leave with a better understanding than the one we brought.