hink about a time when you changed your mind.

Maybe you heard about a crime, and rushed to

judgment about the guilt or innocence of the accused. Perhaps you wanted your country to go to war,
and realise now that maybe that was a bad idea. Or possibly you grew up in a religious or partisan
household, and switched allegiances when you got older. Part of maturing is developing intellectual
humility. You’ve been wrong before; you could be wrong now.

We all are familiar, I take it, with people who refuse to admit mistakes. What do you think about such
people? Do you admire their tenacity? Or do you wish that they would acknowledge that they jumped
to conclusions, misread the evidence, or saw what they wanted to see? Stubborn people are not just
wrong about facts. They can also be mean. Living in society means making compromises and tolerating
people with whom you disagree.

Fortunately, we have a work of philosophy from antiquity filled with strategies to counter dogmatic
tendencies, whether in ourselves or in other people. The book makes one laugh out loud with questions
about whether we know that grass is green, that scorpion stings are deadly, or if it is wrong for parents
to tattoo their babies. The French writer Michel de Montaigne read the book in the 16th century and
used the strategies in his essay ‘An Apology for Raymond Sebond’. Through Montaigne, many European
Enlightenment philosophers came to see a link between scepticism and toleration. Plato’s Republic is
more renowned, but the book from antiquity that people ought to read right now is Sextus Empiricus’
Outlines of Pyrrhonism.