As long as you don’t also claim to be “truth-seeking” in any way, this form of intellectual cravenness is probably better than what most people do, which is just to adopt whatever belief is most convenient given their social circles.
A general commitment to seeking truth doesn’t obligate one to investigate every possible question! I can be quite committed to seeking truth in some areas, while intentionally avoiding quite unrelated ones.
One certainly shouldn’t claim to be truth seeking in areas where one is are intentionally agnostic, but that’s part of why I’m writing this post: so I can later link it to explain why I have chosen not to engage with some question in some area.
I agree, but I strongly disagree with @Shankar Sivarajan that if a person does this in some areas then they shouldn’t “claim to be ‘truth-seeking’ in any way”.
This is probably true in an internal sense, where one needs to be self-honest. It might be very difficult to understand when any conscious person other than you was doing this, and it might be dicey to judge even in yourself. Especially given the finiteness of human attention.
In my personal life, I have spent recent months studying. Did I emotionally turn away from some things in the middle of this, so that to an outside observer I might have looked like I was burying my head or averting my eyes? Sure. Was I doing that or was I setting boundaries? I guess even if you lived in my head at that time, it could be hard to know. Maybe my obsessive studying itself is an avoidance. In the end, I know what I intended, but that’s about it. That’s often all we get, even from the inside.
So while I agree with you, I’m not sure exactly when we should cease to be agnostic about parsing that difference. Maybe it’s something we can only hold it as an ideal, complimentary to striving for Truth, basically?
As long as you don’t also claim to be “truth-seeking” in any way, this form of intellectual cravenness is probably better than what most people do, which is just to adopt whatever belief is most convenient given their social circles.
A general commitment to seeking truth doesn’t obligate one to investigate every possible question! I can be quite committed to seeking truth in some areas, while intentionally avoiding quite unrelated ones.
One certainly shouldn’t claim to be truth seeking in areas where one is are intentionally agnostic, but that’s part of why I’m writing this post: so I can later link it to explain why I have chosen not to engage with some question in some area.
Still, it feels like there’s an important difference between “happening to not look” and “averting your eyes”.
I agree, but I strongly disagree with @Shankar Sivarajan that if a person does this in some areas then they shouldn’t “claim to be ‘truth-seeking’ in any way”.
This is probably true in an internal sense, where one needs to be self-honest. It might be very difficult to understand when any conscious person other than you was doing this, and it might be dicey to judge even in yourself. Especially given the finiteness of human attention.
In my personal life, I have spent recent months studying. Did I emotionally turn away from some things in the middle of this, so that to an outside observer I might have looked like I was burying my head or averting my eyes? Sure. Was I doing that or was I setting boundaries? I guess even if you lived in my head at that time, it could be hard to know. Maybe my obsessive studying itself is an avoidance. In the end, I know what I intended, but that’s about it. That’s often all we get, even from the inside.
So while I agree with you, I’m not sure exactly when we should cease to be agnostic about parsing that difference. Maybe it’s something we can only hold it as an ideal, complimentary to striving for Truth, basically?