Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [4]
A book about being wrong can’t get very far without first making its way across a definitional quagmire: Wrong? About what? Says who? We can be wrong about the integrity of our money manager, the identity of the murder suspect, or the name of the shortstop for the ’62 Mets; about the structure of a hydrogen molecule or the date of the Second Coming; about the location of our car keys or the location of weapons of mass destruction. And that’s just the straightforward stuff. There are also all those things about which we can never be proved wrong, but about which we tend to believe that people who disagree with us are wrong: the author of the Bible, the ethics of abortion, the merits of anchovies, whether it was you or your girlfriend who left the laptop in front of the window before the storm.
As arbitrary as this list is, it raises some important questions about any project that proposes to treat error as a coherent category of human experience. The first question concerns the stakes of our mistakes. The difference between being wrong about your car keys and being wrong about weapons of mass destruction is the difference between “oops” and a global military crisis—consequences so dramatically dissimilar that we might reasonably wonder if the errors that led to them can have anything in common. The second question is whether we can be wrong, in any meaningful sense, about personal beliefs. It’s a long way from the Mets to the moral status of abortion, and some readers will suspect that the conceptual distance between being wrong about facts and being “wrong” about convictions is unbridgeable. Other readers, meanwhile, will raise a different objection: that we can never be completely sure of the truth, and therefore can’t legitimately describe anything as “right” or “wrong.”
In short, trying to forge a unified theory out of our ideas about error is akin to herding cats. Nor is the opposite approach, divvying up wrongness into categories, much easier. Still both tactics have been attempted. The former is a pet project of Western philosophy, which has been attempting to define the essential nature of error from the get-go. For at least the first two thousand years of its existence, philosophy understood itself as the pursuit of knowledge and truth—a job description that obliged its practitioners to be almost equally obsessed with error and falsity. (You can’t define error, Socrates observes in Plato’s Theaetetus, without also defining knowledge; your theory of one hinges entirely on your theory of the other.) As philosophy diversified and formalized its areas of inquiry—into ethics, metaphysics, logic, and so forth—the branch concerned with the study of knowledge became known as epistemology. Epistemologists disagree among themselves about many aspects of error, but from Plato onward they have shared a rough consensus on how to define it: to be wrong is to believe something is true when it is false—or, conversely, to believe it is false when it is true. This admirably straightforward definition will be useful to us, partly because it will help us eavesdrop on philosophical conversations about error, and partly because it captures what we typically mean by wrongness in everyday life. Still, as we’ll soon see, this definition is bedeviled by a problem so significant that I will choose not to rely on it.
If philosophy has traditionally sought to unify and define wrongness, a far newer field—the multidisciplinary effort known sometimes as human factors research and sometimes as decision studies—has sought to subdivide