Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [170]
That is why error, even though it sometimes feels like despair, is actually much closer in spirit to hope. We get things wrong because we have an enduring confidence in our own minds; and we face up to that wrongness in the faith that, having learned something, we will get it right the next time. In this optimistic vein, embracing our fallibility is simply a way of paying homage to, in the words of the late philosopher Richard Rorty, “the permanent possibility of someone having a better idea.” The great advantage of realizing that we have told a story about the world is realizing that we can tell a better one: rich with better ideas, better possibilities—even, perhaps, better people.
NOTES
A vast number and variety of sources—comments from friends, conversations with strangers, formal and informal interviews, news items, radio broadcasts, journal articles, websites, books—helped shape this book in ways both subtle and profound. Many of these do not appear in the final text in any explicit way, and it isn’t practical to cite them all here. Still, wherever possible I have tried to attribute not just specific facts and quotations but also background sources and influences. More generally, I would like to acknowledge my deep debt to the many thinkers who have grappled with the idea of error, and whose work has made possible my own. Where appropriate, I have prefaced the notes to a given chapter with a brief description of particularly valuable sources. Specific citations then follow. I have sourced my footnotes in the order in which they appear in the book; they are distinguished from the main text by the indication (FN).
A note on Wikipedia: I don’t know any writer working today who doesn’t regard it as 1) a pretty questionable source; and 2) surpassingly useful. To the second point, I offer my gratitude for the remarkable and largely anonymous collaborative effort it represents. I made use of it regularly to look up passing facts (was Rousseau born before Laplace, or vice versa?) or to get an initial overview of an unfamiliar subject (the proto-Indo-European language). In these cases, either I or my fact checker cross-referenced such information with other, more conventional resources to try to ensure accuracy. To the first point: as grateful as I am for its existence, I have avoided using Wikipedia as the definitive source for any information in this book, let alone for the substantive philosophical, psychological, scientific, and historical ideas I present. Accordingly, I have not cited it.
CHAPTER 1 WRONGOLOGY
“inattention, distraction, lack of interest.” Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds (Wiley, 1996), 141. In fairness, this quotation is taken somewhat out of context. As a cognitive scientist, Piattelli-Palmarini focuses mainly on the cognitive tendencies that give rise to certain predictable errors; he cites these other reasons largely to sketch the territory he isn’t exploring.
“fallor ergo sum.” The quotation is from Augustine’s The City of God, and is rendered in many different ways in English. I have relied on the 2003 Penguin Classics edition, where Henry Bettenson translates the passage in question (it appears on p. 460) as follows: “In respect of those truths”—that I am, that I know that I am, and that I take delight in it—“I have no fear of the arguments of the Academics. They say, ‘Suppose you are mistaken?’ I reply, ‘If I am mistaken, I exist.’ A nonexistent being cannot be mistaken; therefore I must exist, if I am mistaken. Then since my being mistaken proves that I exist, how can I be mistaken in thinking that I exist, seeing that my mistake establishes my existence?”
Plato’s Theaetetus: The edition of the Theaetetus I relied on was translated by Benjamin Jowett and published in 1949 by the Liberal Arts Press. But I first came across this passage as quoted in Leo W. Keeler’s The Problem of Error from Plato to Kant: A Historical and Critical Study (Apud Aedes Pontificiae Universitatis Gregorianae, 1934),