Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [33]
In a sense, then, people with anosognosia are as wrong as it is possible to be. Other errors might be more sweeping in their consequences or more emotionally devastating: being wrong about your family history, say, or committing wholeheartedly to a theology, ideology, or person you later wholeheartedly reject. But no other error requires us to concede quite so much ground to the sheer possibility of being wrong. If mistakes arise from the gap between our inner picture of the world and the world as it really is, anosognosia shows us that this gap never fully closes, even when we can least fathom its existence. It is all but impossible to imagine that, for instance, my belief that I’m moving my arm could be at odds with what my arm is actually doing. There seems to be no room for doubt, no plausible way I could be wrong. Indeed, we use our certainty about our own bodies to emphasize the depths of our other convictions: we say that we know something like the back of our hands, or that it’s as plain as the nose on our face. Yet neurologists suspect that precisely what goes awry in denial of paralysis and Anton’s syndrome is that the brain mistakes an idea in the mind (in the former case, thinking about moving a limb; in the latter, remembering or imagining a visual landscape) for a feature of the real world. What anosognosia shows us, then, is that wrongness knows no limits—that there is no form of knowledge, however central or unassailable it may seem, that cannot, under certain circumstances, fail us.
This fallibility of knowledge is gravely disappointing, because we really, really love to know things. One of my nieces, who is not yet eighteen months old, recently uttered her first sentence. It was “I know.” To have such scanty experience of the world and so much implacable assurance is pretty impressive—but my niece, as much as I adore her, is not exceptional in this regard. From the time we learn to talk until death finally silences us, we all toss around claims to knowledge with profligate enthusiasm. We know, or think we know, innumerable things, and we enjoy the feeling of mastery and confidence our knowledge gives us.
Unfortunately, as we just saw, this knowledge is always at risk of failing. Moreover (as we’ll see next) the barometer we use to determine whether we do or don’t know something is deeply, unfixably flawed. By contrast—although not reassuringly—our capacity to ignore the fact that we don’t know things works wonderfully. In sum: we love to know things, but ultimately we can’t know for sure that we know them; we are bad at recognizing when we don’t know something; and we are very, very good at making stuff up. All this serves to render the category of “knowledge” unreliable—so much so that this chapter exists largely to convince you to abandon it (if only temporarily, for the purpose of understanding wrongness) in favor of the category of belief.
We’ll look at that category more closely in the next chapter, but for now, suffice it to say that it includes just about every idea you have about the world—whether or not you know you have it, and whether or not it is true. For several millennia, philosophers have tried to identify criteria by which some of those beliefs could be elevated into the loftier category of knowledge: things we can reasonably claim to know beyond a shadow of a doubt. The most enduring suggestion was offered by Plato, who defined knowledge as “justified true belief.” To his mind, you could only claim to know something if A) it was true; and B) you could come up with a good explanation for why it was true. That ruled out false beliefs with strong explanations (such as the claim that the sun revolved around the earth), as well as true beliefs with weak explanation (such as my claim that I’m holding the winning