Even if the jury’s out, it’s a poor courtroom that discourages the plaintiff, defendant, witnesses, and attorneys from sharing their epistemic state, for fear of offending others in the courtroom!
It may well be true that sharing your honest models of (say) philosophy of religion is a terrible idea and should never happen in public, if you want to have any hope of convincing any philosophers of religion in the future. But… well, if intellectual discourse is in as grim and lightless a state as all that, I hope we can at least have clear sights about how bad that is, and how much better it would be if we somehow found a way to just share our models of the field and discuss those plainly. I can’t say it’s impossible to end up in situations like that, but I can push for the conditional policy ‘if you end up in that kind of situation, be super clear about how terrible this is and keep an eye out for ways to improve on it’.
You don’t have to be extremely confident in your view’s stability (i.e., whether you expect to change your view a lot based on future evidence) or its transmissibility in order to have a view at all. And if people don’t share their views — or especially, if they are happier to share positive views of groups than negative ones, or otherwise have some systemic bias in what they share — the group’s aggregate beliefs will be less accurate.
Even if the jury’s out, it’s a poor courtroom that discourages the plaintiff, defendant, witnesses, and attorneys from sharing their epistemic state, for fear of offending others in the courtroom!
It may well be true that sharing your honest models of (say) philosophy of religion is a terrible idea and should never happen in public, if you want to have any hope of convincing any philosophers of religion in the future. But… well, if intellectual discourse is in as grim and lightless a state as all that, I hope we can at least have clear sights about how bad that is, and how much better it would be if we somehow found a way to just share our models of the field and discuss those plainly. I can’t say it’s impossible to end up in situations like that, but I can push for the conditional policy ‘if you end up in that kind of situation, be super clear about how terrible this is and keep an eye out for ways to improve on it’.
You don’t have to be extremely confident in your view’s stability (i.e., whether you expect to change your view a lot based on future evidence) or its transmissibility in order to have a view at all. And if people don’t share their views — or especially, if they are happier to share positive views of groups than negative ones, or otherwise have some systemic bias in what they share — the group’s aggregate beliefs will be less accurate.