Wisdom, Open-Mindedness, and KK-Failure

Wise agents are characteristically open-minded. In this paper I discuss why that is the case. Central to my argument is the notion that open-mindedness is an inquiring attitude. A standard thought about inquiring attitudes is that they entail ignorance – if S is inquiring into a question q then S doesn’t know its answer pq. This, however, doesn’t sit well with some of our intuitions about open-mindedness for, as I shall show, there are instances of open-mindedness where S knows that pq and yet is justified in inquiring into q. I explain that such instances are best explained in terms of KK-failure, i.e., failing to know that one knows, and more specifically a sort of KK-failure that emerges out of S’s sensitivity to unawareness. I argue that a wise agent too is in a similar state of KK-failure in relation to the body of knowledge that makes her wise, and it’s precisely because of this that a wise agent remains characteristically open-minded.