possibility for individuals to be open-minded about all their important beliefs including
the commitment to open-mindedness itself' (ibid p. 211)
As an alternative, Bramall suggests the need for a disposition to be not only open-
minded in terms of rational evidence and argument as put forward by Hare but also to
be open-minded about our own world view. The essential difference being that not only
will I be ‘able and willing to form an opinion, or revise it, in the light of evidence and
argument’ but that I will also be able and willing to extend the scope of my evidence
and argument by using frames of reference hitherto alien to my firmly held perspective
of the world. IfI understand Bramall correctly he is asking us to extend our view to
take account of evidence and argument that we would normally reject on rational liberal
grounds; that is, evidence and/or argument that does not meet the usual rational liberal
criteria employed to provide legitimacy. While I can appreciate that this is indeed
consistent with the notion of open-mindedness, particularly that proposed by Bramall, I
remain concerned as to how we are to know what is to count and what is not to count as
appropriate evidence and/or argument. This is a pressing problem if nurses are to avoid
being accused of credulousness. The idea of open-mindedness as a virtue is strong in
Bramalfs account. He talks of the 'dispositionally anti-dogmatic' person which seems to
be the main purpose of educating for open-mindedness. The challenge for educators, of
course, is to create an environment in which open-mindedness can flourish and this will
be discussed further in Chapter 6.
Why open-mindedness is necessary for nursing practice
One of my firmly held beliefs is that nursing is a MacIntyrean practice (Sellman 2000)
engagement with which requires what MacIntyre (1985) describes as the three core
virtues of a practice: the virtues of courage, truthfulness, and justice. In the previous
chapter I presented a case for accepting trustworthiness as one additional necessary
professional virtue. In this chapter I claim that open-mindedness is a second additional
necessary professional virtue for the practice of nursing.
There is an emphasis in nursing, as there is in other social professions, for practice to be
based on evidence. The major assumption behind this is that practice based on evidence
is more likely to be beneficial to those whose interests the profession is designed to
serve. A further assumption is that individual practitioners have the capacity or
willingness to change their practice in the light of appropriate sorts of evidence. If this
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