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By Root 1094 0

to my sister, Laura Schulz, a cognitive scientist at MIT, whose own work on the double-edged sword of human cognition has been invaluable to me here, and who fundamentally altered and dramatically deepened my understanding of inductive reasoning. I could not have written this chapter without her assistance—or, rather, I could not have written it accurately and well. Among many other things, she supplied me with the idea of the inductive reasoning quiz and pointed me in the direction of Willard Van Orman Quine, whose work on the indeterminacy of translation was originally presented in his Word and Object (The MIT Press, 1964). She also supplied the connection between inductive reasoning and Noam Chomsky’s “poverty of the stimulus” problem, as well as the example of Neptune and Uranus.

I first learned of Judge William Stoughton upon driving through his namesake town, Stoughton, Massachusetts. The information about him and about spectral evidence in this chapter comes from biographical information provided by the town (available at http://www.stoughtonhistory.com/williamstoughton.htm), and from Francis Hill, The Salem Witch Trials Reader (De Capo Press, 2000), 90. Interestingly, the dispute over the use of spectral evidence was as much theological as judicial, since it centered on the question of whether or not the devil required permission from people to use their image to torment the (ostensible) victims of witchcraft. People who believed that the devil could do whatever he pleased were opposed to the use of spectral evidence, on the theory that the Goody Proctors of the world were not merely blameless but, themselves, victims. By contrast, people who believed that the devil needed permission from mortals in order to use their image supported spectral evidence, since anyone who appeared as an evildoer in dreams or visitations had clearly made a pact with Satan. See David Levin’s “Shadows of Doubt: Specter Evidence in Hawthorne’s ‘In Young Goodman Brown,’” American Literature, Vol. 34, No. 3 (1962): 344–352.

Donald Leka and Elizabeth O’Donovan are both strangers who responded to a general request I made for stories about wrongness. The quotations in those passages are from direct communications with the two of them.

“beliefs follow from relatively dispassionate assessment.” “Against Simulation: The Argument From Error,” Rebecca Saxe, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 9, No. 4 (April 2005): 174–179.

Descartes defined error. See Keeler, 161: “where it is not perfectly evident, there is no true knowledge; and if I assent to something that is really so, without full and firm certitude that it is so, I commit an error. Error does not consist precisely in judging that to be, which is not, but in rashly venturing to pronounce in the absence of evidence.” Some readers will note that this was the position William James argued against in The Will to Believe. James, however, took as his intellectual opposition not Descartes but the philosopher William Clifford (James calls him “that delicious enfant terrible”), who wrote, “Belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer…. If [a] belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence…[i]t is sinful because it is stolen in defiance of our duty to mankind. That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs as from a pestilence which may shortly master our own body and then spread to the rest of the town…. It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” (James, The Will to Believe, 8.)

Augustine, who arrived at Descartes’ idea of error. Keeler, 74–75.

Monotheistic religions have a particularly interesting and troubled relationship to the idea of evidence (FN). The writer Sam Harris made a similar point in The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (W. W. Norton, 2005). See for instance p. 66: “But faith is an imposter. This can be readily seen in the way that all the extraordinary phenomena of the religious life—a statue of the Virgin weeps,