Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [159]
The revised “Time-out Script” implemented at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center following a wrong-site surgery in the summer of 2008.
Perhaps because that doesn’t seem like very godly behavior, Descartes’ conceit has come to be known as the Evil Genius. The Evil Genius might be the most thoroughgoing method ever devised for embracing the possibility that we could be wrong. It led Descartes to doubt everything that could possibly be doubted, including (as I mentioned earlier) his own existence—although, famously, our existence is the one thing he finally conceded that we can bank on. The logic works like this: I might not have arms and legs, although I feel quite convinced that I do; I might not have free will; I might not have a sky overhead or a laptop and a coffee cup in front of me. An all-powerful evil genius could make me believe in all these things, even if none of them exist. But even an evil genius can’t trick me into thinking that I’m thinking. If I think I am thinking, I am necessarily thinking. Moreover, there must be some kind of “I” hanging around doing this thinking, even if it doesn’t happen to have limbs or free will or a caffeine addiction. And there you have it: cogito, ergo sum.
It’s nice to be reassured that we can think, but we could be forgiven at this point for wondering: To what end? From philosophical treatments of error, we learn that our thoughts exist but that they might not bear much resemblance to the real state of the world. From industrial and political treatments, we learn that even the best efforts to remain alert to error can’t always save us and our society from catastrophic mistakes. And recall, too, the Pessimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Everything—the notion that many of our most convincing ideas have proved wrong in the past, and that many of our new ones will therefore prove wrong in the future.
What are we to do with this much pessimism, this much radical uncertainty? Do we need it? Is it useful? The pragmatist Charles Peirce thought not; he scoffed at Descartes, counseling that we should not “doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” Fair enough: as we’ve seen, all of us hold (and need to hold) some beliefs that are either below the level of conscious awareness or, to our minds, above dispute. I, for one, don’t waste time doubting my own existence, or for that matter any of my deepest ethical principles. Still, on the whole, I’m inclined to think that Pierce got it wrong. Doubt is the act of challenging our beliefs. If we have developed formal methods for doing so, it is because, as I have shown, our hearts are bad at it.
And we pay a price for this weakness. I don’t just mean we make mistakes we could avoid if we tempered our beliefs with doubt. It’s true that those mistakes can be costly, but the price of ignoring our fallibility goes well beyond that. It extends, in fact, to our overall outlook on the world. 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. This isn’t Hamlet’s doubt—that of agony in the face of a difficult decision. Nor is it the doubt of insecurity, apprehension, or indifference. This is an active, investigative doubt: the kind that inspires us to wander onto shaky limbs or out into left field; the kind that doesn’t divide the mind so much