Intellectual honesty: being up-front not just about what you believe, but also why you believe it, what your motivations are in saying it, and the degree to which you have evidence for it.
If you have extensive knowledge about a topic it's often not possible to communicate all of that. Attempting to do so also means that you take up a lot of valuable speaking time. Especially in group discussions where only one person can speak at a time.
In that time that you take to speak about a subject it's also worthwhile to focus on arguments that the other person can evaluate. We believe a lot of things based on personal experience. When there's published scientific evidence for those beliefs it's better to appeal to the scientific evidence than appealing to one's personal experience even when that might mislead the other person about why one holds a certain belief.
I'm just reading Keith Stanovich book "How To Think Straight About Psychology". In it he makes the argument that scientists should not be open about personal beliefs they hold for which they have no scientific evidence.
It's not possible to communicate all the reasons, agreed -- it's often not even possible to articulate all of one's reasons even given unlimited time. However, the difference I'm pointing at is larger than the time-allocation problem. It's the difference between agreeing with someone as a sign of social support vs as a sign that you have further evidence in the same direction. This changes the way conversational resources are allocated (often saving a lot of time, as I argued in my original post), but the reason for the change is due to a shift in the underlying goal of the conversation.
Cross-posted to my blog.
A while ago, I wrote about epistemic trust. The thrust of my argument was that rational argument is often more a function of the group dynamic, as opposed to how rational the individuals in the group are. I assigned meaning to several terms, in order to explain this:
Intellectual honesty: being up-front not just about what you believe, but also why you believe it, what your motivations are in saying it, and the degree to which you have evidence for it.
Intellectual-Honesty Culture: The norm of intellectual honesty. Calling out mistakes and immediately admitting them; feeling comfortable with giving and receiving criticism.
Face Culture: Norms associated with lack of intellectual honesty. In particular, a need to save face when one's statements turn out to be incorrect or irrelevant; the need to make everyone feel included by praising contributions and excusing mistakes.
Intellectual trust: the expectation that others in the discussion have common intellectual goals; that criticism is an attempt to help, rather than an attack. The kind of trust required to take other people's comments at face value rather than being overly concerned with ulterior motives, especially ideological motives. I hypothesized that this is caused largely by ideological common ground, and that this is the main way of achieving intellectual-honesty culture.
There are several subtleties which I did not emphasize last time.