Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [172]
Ross Gelbspan. Ross initially shared his story with me via email. The quotations here are from a subsequent phone interview.
“The mind being the faculty of truth.” Keeler, 87.
France’s Larousse dictionary. I found both this definition and the one from Diderot’s Encyclopédie in David Bates’s Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France (Cornell University Press, 2002), an immensely useful intellectual history of error. The first definition appears on p. 20, the second on p. 25.
James Sully. James Sully, Illusions: A Psychological Study (IndyPublish, undated), 116. Sully goes on to make a much more extensive case that error is on the decline in the human species, an argument he bases in large part on the then-nascent field of evolutionary theory. “All correspondence, [the evolutionist] tells us, means fitness to external conditions and practical efficiency, all want of correspondence practical incompetence. Consequently, those individuals in whom the correspondence was more complete and exact would have an advantage in the struggle for existence and so tend to be preserved…. It may be argued, the forces at work in the action of man on man, of society on the individual, in the way of assimilating belief, must tend, in the long run, to bring about a coincidence between representations and facts. Thus, in another way, natural selection would help to adjust our ideas to realities, and to exclude the possibility of anything like a permanent common error.” Then there’s just the sheer matter of practice: “The exercise of a function tends to the development of that function. Thus, our acts of perception must become more exact by mere repetition…. For external relations which are permanent will, in the long run, stamp themselves on our nervous and mental structure more deeply and indelibly than relations which are variable and accidental.” See pp. 192–193.
Joseph Jastrow. Joseph Jastrow, The Story of Human Error: False Leads in the Stages of Science (D. Appelton-Century Company, Inc., 1936), 11. The book is behemoth in scope—Jastrow takes “science” to include anthropology, sociology, psychology, and psychiatry, in addition to the more obvious suspects—but his introduction is both short and charming. He conceives of his work “as a project in errorology,” which sounds akin to my own, but he is interested largely in errors that remained unknown to their makers and were revealed only to posterity.
“World of Tomorrow.” Roland Barker, ed., Official Guide Book: New York World’s Fair 1939: The World of Tomorrow (Exposition Publications, 1939), 2.
error’s “grosser forms.” Sully, 186.
Ralph Linton. Ralph Linton, “Error in Anthropology,” in Jastrow, ed., 298.
that era’s hallmark development, the scientific method. Systematic methods for inquiring into the natural world have been around for ages: ancient Greek naturalists practiced a form of empiricism, and medieval Muslim scientists developed a method of inquiry that relied on experimentation to weigh competing hypotheses. But the scientific method as we understand it today was introduced to the world through the work of Francis Bacon in his 1620 Novum Organum, and René Descartes in his 1637 Discourse on the Method. Whether or not this method has ever been practiced as such (that is, to what extent scientists, especially as individuals, seek to replicate experiments and falsify hypotheses) is an open question, as Thomas Kuhn made abundantly clear in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. But my point here concerns the method as an intellectual ideal more than an actual practice.
“For Satan himself.” The Bible, New International Version (HarperTorch, 1993), 2 Corinthians 11:14–15.
errors as ignes fatui. Bates, 46.
Pierre-Simon Laplace. Bates touches on this development toward the end of Enlightenment Aberrations (248), but my primary source here was Steven M. Stigler’s History of Statistics: The Measurement