Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [14]
“Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things.” That cheery quote, which heads this chapter, could be the motto of the optimistic model of wrongness; and its author, the nineteenth-century philosopher and psychologist William James, could serve as its foremost spokesperson. For a representative of the pessimistic model, we might return to Thomas Aquinas, the medieval monk who tipped his hand in the last chapter by associating error with original sin. “The mind being the faculty of truth,” wrote the philosopher Leo Keeler, both summarizing and quoting Aquinas, “error cannot be its normal fruit, but will necessarily have the character of a defective byproduct, an accidental disorder, a miscarriage comparable to ‘monstrous births’ in nature.”
Defective, accidental, monstrous, a miscarriage: the message is clear enough. For Aquinas, error was not merely abhorrent but also abnormal, a perversion of the prescribed order of things. William James, had he been around, would have had none of it—none of the revulsion (this was a man whose prescription for error was “a certain lightness of heart”), and none of the business about abnormality, either. Given that all of us get things wrong again and again, how abnormal, he might have asked, can error possibly be?
This debate over whether error is normal or abnormal is central to the history of how we think about wrongness. What’s most interesting about the debate isn’t what it tells us about wrongness per se, but what it tells us about the kind of creatures we think we are and the kind of world we think we live in. Take Aquinas and James: they fundamentally disagreed, but their disagreement was only secondarily about error. The real issue was Aquinas’s claim about “the mind being the faculty of truth.” If you believe, as he did, that there is a truth and that (to borrow James’s formulation) “our minds and it are made for each other,” then error is both deplorable and difficult to explain. On the other hand, if 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.
These competing ideas of error crop up in efforts to define the term, as we saw when we tried to do so ourselves. In the 1600s, France’s Larousse dictionary defined error, rather beautifully, as “a vagabondage of the imagination, of the mind that is not subject to any rule.” Scarcely a hundred years later, in the same country, Denis Diderot’s famed Encyclopédie defined it, instead, as endemic to every human mind, that “magic mirror” in which the real world is distorted into “shadows and monsters.” These two definitions suggest two markedly different understandings of human nature. As error goes from being a hallmark of the lawless mind to our native condition, people cease to be fundamentally perfectible and become fundamentally imperfect. Meanwhile, truth goes from being a prize that can be achieved through spiritual or intellectual discipline to a fugitive that forever eludes the human mind.
The history of error is not an account of the shift from one of these frameworks to the other. Instead, it is an ongoing, millennia-long argument between the two. Over that time, this argument has come to be defined by several other questions, in addition and closely related to whether screwing up is basically aberrant or basically normal. One of these questions is whether error is with us to stay or if it can somehow be eradicated. James Sully, a British psychologist whose 1881 Illusions constitutes perhaps the most thoroughgoing early investigation of human error, thought that most forms of it would eventually be overcome. Observing that “the power of introspection is a comparatively new acquisition of the human race,” Sully concluded that “as it improves, the amount of error