The end aimed at is not knowledge but action

Once again on the trail of an attributed quotation that appears to be too good to be true.

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” – Aristotle

Love the sentiment but that seems to have just too much of a trace of the modernist smugness and sanctimony.

And indeed, the suspicion is warranted.

It appears that this is a repurposing of some Aristotelian ideas from the Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, section 3.

It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.

I get the general idea. Don't push for precision beyond your knowledge frontier. What about the addendum, "it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician"? I understand that it is foolish not to expect scientific proofs from a rhetorician. Not expecting probable reasoning from a mathematician, though? I suspect what is happening here is a matter of definitions and language. That in Aristotle's day, preceding the separate science of statistics and probabilities, mathematics was a series of defined laws which led to discrete answers rather than probabilities. I am guessing that the original import of Aristotle's words is that we should not expect imaginative speculation from a mathematician just as we should not expect scientific proofs from a rhetorician.

The paragraph following this statement is also interesting in light of Philip Tetlock's research on effective team decision-making (informed generalists tend to make better decisions than deep knowledge experts).

Now each man judges well the things he knows, and of these he is a good judge. And so the man who has been educated in a subject is a good judge of that subject, and the man who has received an all-round education is a good judge in general. Hence a young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end aimed at is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character; the defect does not depend on time, but on his living, and pursuing each successive object, as passion directs. For to such persons, as to the incontinent, knowledge brings no profit; but to those who desire and act in accordance with a rational principle knowledge about such matters will be of great benefit.

"The end aimed at is not knowledge but action." Doesn't that sound like our politicians, activists and advocacy groups. There seems a universal desire for action over any demonstration that the action will actually achieve the desired aim.

I find that explanation interesting; "the defect does not depend on time, but on his living." In other words, it is not a matter of chronological age but of inadequate experience. That one can live a sufficiently sheltered life that even though the count in years might be high, the capacity to speak from deep, rich, and varied experience may still be shallow.