"This is surprising, given philosophy's very nature. It thrives on debate, supplying endless reasons to question one's stance. Philosopher Will Buckingham once remarked that, if reasoned dialogue worked as we might expect, philosophers would be shifting their views "with a quicksilver frequency that would put the rest of us to shame." After all, in a world teeming with critical colleagues and formidable counterarguments, one might imagine minds constantly turning over."
"He even defended it openly, presenting self-revision as a mark of intellectual honesty. In 1988, in the introduction to his major work Representation and Reality, he performed one of his most striking turnarounds: renouncing functionalism, the computational model of mind he had once advanced. Anticipating disapproval, he asked why colleagues treated this habit as a flaw. Perhaps, Putnam quipped, he erred more often - while "other philosophers don't change their minds because they simply never make mistakes." For him, obstinacy was far worse than correction."
Philosophical practitioners seldom revise their major positions across careers. The discipline's adversarial environment would seem to foster frequent changes of mind via reasoned dialogue and counterargument. Many philosophers invest immense time and intellectual labor into elaborate arguments, which creates a psychological and professional resistance to abandoning them. Hilary Putnam treated self-revision as intellectual honesty and publicly renounced earlier commitments such as functionalism. Will Buckingham highlighted that genuine dialogue should produce rapid changes of view, while others often persist out of pride or fear of appearing mistaken. Changing one's mind can signal epistemic humility and a commitment to truth.
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