It requires courage to listen and seriously consider that the other person may be telling us something that is true and useful.
Not all critics were convinced by this – the Sunday Times (pay wall) was sceptical – but I find it both a true and useful way of looking at him.
The Lagoon, she felt, "is a book written by a scientist for other scientists – or rather, for anyone who shares Leroi's blithe confidence that only science can yield true and useful knowledge about the world".
In the spring of 1876, the Arizona Citizen declared: "Ochoa is constantly doing good for the public," and concluded, "Ochoa is the true and useful friend of the worthy poor, of the oppressed, and of good government".
Being open minded simply means that you do not just accept an opinion or view as being true or useful.
Dawkins has acknowledged that stories do not have to be true to be useful.
For decades, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, the gavelling off of Thomas Jefferson's children was a story that was either too awful to be true or too useful to be proved false.
And yet quite a good deal will be said in the next few days about how hard it is to be so publicly married, or to be married at all, and about what that says about love in general — and it's theoretically possible that some of it will be true, or even useful.
The first is to argue that mathematical theories don't have to be true to be useful in applications, they need merely to be conservative.
The linguistic thesis is, roughly, that already expressed above, according to which utterances of sentences of the discourse are best seen not as efforts to say what is literally true, but as useful fictions of some sort.
