RALEIGH – “To prejudge other men’s notions before we have looked into them,” John Locke once perceptively wrote, “is not to show their darkness but to put out our own eyes.”

An openness to new ideas and a willingness to subject old ideas to critical examination are both essential to the successful pursuit of knowledge. We all know people who refuse to reconsider a cherished belief in light of new information, or who dismiss innovation just because “that’s not the way we do things.” They are not practicing the virtues of persistence or consistency. They are just being stubborn.

On the flip side, however, to keep an open mind is not to keep an empty mind. Nor should an openness to new ideas be equated with a preference for intellectual novelty or a presumption that established principles, morals, or habits must be outdated. That’s just another form of dogmatism, another kind of intellectual stubbornness.

Science, for example, has been a source of tremendous innovation, invention, and progress for centuries – but it is also, at its heart, a small-c conservative enterprise. Most scientific advances are refinements of prior theories, not brand new ones, and conscientious scientists are careful in the claims they choose to make. I consider the Karl Popper model of the scientific method to be the ideal one. It begins by examining the world, looking for patterns, and then forming a theory that seems likely to explain the patterns – that is, that explains the past in a way that allows us to predict the future.

Scientists are then supposed to subject such a theory to rigorous testing. Their goal is not to prove the theory true but to disprove the theory, which individual experiments can in fact accomplish. If a theory stands up to repeated experimentation without being falsified, then we can have greater confidence its explanatory power and use it to solve problems. There is always the possibility, however, that some future experiment – conducted under different conditions or with more precise instruments – may disprove the theory. That’s what it means to be open to new ideas and willing to subject old ones to critical examination without sliding into philosophical errors such as nihilism or relativism.

(To argue that science should proceed in this way is not necessarily to establish that it always or even usually does. See Kuhn, Thomas.)

Not all knowledge is scientific, of course. Some beliefs about God, mankind, and the natural world can’t really be disproven through any imaginable experiment. That does not make them wrong, not by a long shot. But if they are not falsifiable, they are not scientific propositions. Still, they can be subjected to rigorous logical examination or challenged by new ideas and experiences. They should be.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the common human impulse to resist empirical or logical challenges to long-held beliefs. You see this in politics all the time. A voter supports a candidate, the candidate subsequently disappoints, but the voter can’t bring himself to oppose the candidate for reelection. Part of the problem, it seems, is that of sunken costs – having previously invested your time, energy, hopes, or reputation into a politician, it’s hard to admit that the investment was unwise or wasteful. So, in a sense, you double down and stick with your politician, even though it might make more sense to choose someone else.

Another area where stubbornness can trump the pursuit of truth is history. Many of us learn, understand, and apply historical knowledge in the form of biographical anecdotes, origin stories, and other narratives that we have heard all our lives and that help us make sense of the world. But as historians have subjected these narratives to empirical examination, they have often found them to be exaggerated, misleading, or just flat-out wrong.

Here are some stray examples in North Carolina history:

• For decades, it was widely assumed that the first Confederate death of the Civil War was of a North Carolinian, and that the state was the single-largest contributor of troops to the Southern war effort. The first assertion is wrong and the second is now at least debatable.

• Many residents of the Cabarrus County town of Kannapolis continue to believe the story that its name derives from Greek terms meaning “city of looms.” The tale was plausible, given the town’s birth as a center of textile and apparel manufacturing, but it is false, as local historian Norris Dearmon, among others, has patiently explained for years (he happens to be the father of my close friend Mark Dearmon).

• Some fans of the late Hugh Morton – photographer, community leader, and longtime owner of Grandfather Mountain – still believe that he “saved” Grandfather from being built over by the Blue Ridge Parkway. Nope, it didn’t happen that way at all.

I say bring on the hypothesis-testers, the skeptics, and the truth-seekers. Listen to what they have to say. They may not be right, but even their errors or misinterpretations can add to the stock of knowledge.

Unless, of course, they try to argue that James K. Polk wasn’t America’s greatest president. That would just be crazy talk.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.