Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
Kathryn Schulz (2010, Harper Collins)
To err is human; it’s also distressing, discouraging, and sometimes downright humiliating. None of us is perfect, just as none of us is immortal. Kathryn Schulz’s book is onto this right from the beginning: “As with dying, we recognize erring as something that happens to everyone, without feeling that it is either plausible or desirable that it will happen to us. Accordingly, when mistakes happen anyway, we typically respond as if they hadn’t, or as if they shouldn’t have: we deny them, wax defensive about them, ignore them, downplay them, or blame them on somebody else.” All true, all familiar; we are, personally and as a society, terrible at simply acknowledging error.
So here’s a whole book about what Schulz calls ‘wrongology,’ treating error both as an idea and as an experience. Philosophers have thought about error for pretty much as long as there have been philosophers. Thomas Aquinas adhered to the pessimistic view, that error was a terrible defect, because people had a natural faculty for truth. William James was more accepting, says Schulz: “[I]f you believe that truth is not necessarily fixed or knowable, and that the human mind, while a dazzling entity in its own right (in fact, because it is a dazzling entity in its own right), is not reality’s looking glass–if you believe all of that, as James did, then error is both explicable and acceptable.”
Both of those views have their appeal, and they remain in tension. It seems a worthy pursuit to narrow the distance between ourselves and truth, or perfection. That would seem to entail trying to eliminate errors; but “to believe we can eradicate error, we must also believe that we can consistently distinguish between it and the truth–a faith squarely at odds with remembering that we ourselves could be wrong. Thus the catch-22 of wrongology: in order to get rid of error, we would already need to be infallible.” Or else, inevitably, we’d commit new errors in the process.
Modern science, since the seventeenth century or so, has turned that likelihood into a tool for truth-seeking. “These thinkers [Michel de Montaigne and René Descartes] weren’t nihilists, nor even skeptics. They believed in truth, and they wanted to discover it. But they were chastened by the still-palpable possibility of drastic error, and they understood that, from a sufficiently distant vantage point, even their most cherished convictions might come to look like mistakes.” The scientific method, the practice of devising testable hypotheses and testing them, has brought the search for truth a very long way.
Soon enough, Schulz comes down from these dizzy conceptual heights. She tells stories from all over the map, about people who have made life-changing mistakes; or rather, had their lives changed by understanding themselves to have been mistaken. (‘I was wrong’ is a common enough sentence; ‘I am wrong’ is almost unheard of.) Some cases are rare, like the Klansman who recognized that his perceived adversary had all the same problems he had; others are as ordinary as a divorce lawyer’s waiting room.
This is really my kind of book: abstract, extensive, and wise. How about this: “When Socrates taught his students, he didn’t try to stuff them full of knowledge. Instead, he sought to fill them with aporia: with a sense of doubt, perplexity and awe in the face of the complexity and contradictions of the world. If we are unable to embrace our fallibility, we lose out on that kind of doubt.” Allow me to wish you a life of doubt, perplexity and awe.
Any Good Books, September 2023
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