The Human Mind and the Open Society

This summer school focuses on how understanding the human mind as a tool for navigating a richly social existence can inform our understanding and advocacy of open society, and the ideals it represents.

The notion of open society is an attempt to answer the question of how we can effectively live together in large and modern environments. Its ideals include commitments to the rule of law, freedom of association, democratic institutions, and the free use of reason and critical analysis. Arguments in favour of these ideals necessarily depend on assumptions—sometimes hidden and unexamined—about the human mind. Yet our knowledge of how the mind works has advanced considerably since the notion of the open society was first developed. Especially over the past 30 or so years, it has become increasingly clear that human minds are not fundamentally geared towards cold logic and problem solving as, for instance, Karl Popper assumed. Humans do these things but they are not the essential functions of the mind. Nor are human minds geared simply towards a simple utility calculus: we are not Homo economicus. What the modern sciences of the mind have revealed is the extent to which human psychology is geared towards effectiveness in a world of repeated interpersonal engagement. If we are ‘rational’, then we are rational in the mode of someone like Jürgen Habermas, who viewed humans as socially smart, critically-minded communicators.