Benjamin Franklin: Founding Thinker

Thinking about: Thinking more and better

America recently celebrated its semi-quincentennial. As that celebration approached, I happened to be reading Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. It soon became apparent that besides being a singularly impressive person, Franklin was a prime example of an open-minded critical thinker—of what I refer to as a Thinker, with a capital T.

Franklin’s formal education began at age eight but ended only two years later, when his father needed help in the family’s candle- and soap-making business. He subsequently embarked on a program of self-education and became a voracious reader. He taught himself how to write effectively by reading essays in The Spectator. He also taught himself arithmetic, navigation, and several languages. He did this, I should add, at a time when books were hard to come by. As an adult, he founded the first successful lending library in America. Such libraries paved the way for the public libraries that we know and love.

According to his Autobiography, Franklin came across the Socratic method while reading Xenophon. To employ this method, you don’t shout down those who disagree with you. You don’t even give arguments and evidence in support of your contrary beliefs. You instead ask questions about their beliefs. By doing this, you can trigger in them the realization that their beliefs don’t quite gel, or even that their beliefs are inconsistent.

Franklin was sufficiently impressed with the Socratic method that he stopped debating those who didn’t share his beliefs and instead played the role of “humble inquirer and doubter.” [Part one, section 16.] He adds that

I found this method safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom I used it. Therefore I took a delight in it, practicing it continually, and grew very artful and expert in drawing people, even of superior knowledge, into concessions, the consequences of which they did not foresee, entangling them in difficulties out of which they could not extricate themselves.

He also made a point of being epistemically humble—of expressing himself

in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced anything that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken.

He subsequently elaborates on this strategy:

I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiments of others, and all positive assertion of my own. I even forbid myself ... the use of every word or expression in the language that imported a fixed opinion, such as certainly, undoubtedly, etc., and I adopted, instead of them, I conceive, I apprehend, or I imagine a thing to be so or so, or it so appears to me at present. When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering, I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appeared or seemed to me some difference, etc. I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engaged in went on more pleasantly. [Part two, section 19.]

Although it took conscious effort to transform himself into an epistemically humble Thinker, playing this role subsequently became habitual—indeed, so much so that, he tells us, “perhaps for these fifty years past no one has ever heard a dogmatical expression escape me.” As I have explained, Thinkers won’t just claim to be uncertain of the truth of many of their beliefs; they genuinely won’t be certain.

Franklin realized that if you try to impose your beliefs on others, there is a danger that instead of persuading them, you “provoke contradiction and prevent a candid attention” to your views. In contrast, “The modest way in which I proposed my opinions procured them a readier reception and less contradiction.” [Part two, section 20.]

This behavior also made it easier for him to discover and abandon his own mistaken beliefs: “I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevailed with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right.” More generally, he tells us that by trying to impose your beliefs on others, you deprive yourself of the opportunity to learn from them:

If you wish information and improvement from the knowledge of others, and yet, at the same time, express yourself as firmly fixed in your present opinions, modest, sensible men, who do not love disputation, will probably leave you undisturbed in the possession of your error.” [Part one, section 16.]

Thinkers, as we have seen, will be open to the possibility that those who disagree with them are correct and that they themselves are mistaken. Make it their goal to win arguments at all costs, and they deprive themselves of this path to self-improvement.

By his own admission, Franklin was “a bad speaker, never eloquent, subject to much hesitation in my choice of words, [and] hardly correct in language.” He was nevertheless able to persuade others in a way that had a profound impact on the founding of a new nation. He attributes this ability to his intellectual disposition, along with his reputation for integrity. [Part two, section 21.]

There are many individuals who can justly lay claim to the title of founding father of America. Perhaps it isn’t an overstatement to characterize Franklin not just as a founding father but as a founding Thinker.

Need more food for thought? Click here for my past essays, listed by title. Want to listen to rather than read my essays? Click here for narrations of my essays on becoming a Thinker, and click here for narrations of my essays on “applied thinking.” Narrations of my essays on becoming a Thinker are also available on your podcast app. To play them, open that app and search for “Thinking More and Better.”