Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [59]
There are certainly other rebuttals, though, because language isn’t the only crucial skill you learned this way. You also used inductive reasoning to learn how to divide the world into categories and kinds—which is why you were somehow able to grasp the concept of “dog” based on a sample population consisting solely of, say, a golden retriever, a shih tzu, and Scooby Doo. Likewise, you used inductive reasoning to learn about the relationships between causes and effects. Just as no one had to teach you the general principles of grammar or the general principles of dogginess, no one had to teach you that, say, lights are usually turned on by flipping switches. You just saw it happen a few times, and in very short order, the relationship between switches and lights was cemented in your mind. (As an adult, if you’re standing around indoors and a light suddenly goes on, you’ll immediately look around to see who flipped the switch.)
What is true of physical causes and effects is also true of biological and emotional causation. Thanks to inductive reasoning, we are able to determine very quickly that experiencing a strange itchy sensation in our nose means that we are about to sneeze, and that using the F word makes Mom angry. As the latter example suggests, induction is central to how we learn about people, including ourselves. Indeed, much of psychoanalytic theory is based on the belief that our earliest interactions with a tiny number of people permanently shape our theories about who we are, what other people are like, and what kind of treatment we can expect to receive throughout our lives.
Language, categorization, causality, psychology: without expertise in these domains, we would be sunk. And without inductive reasoning—the capacity to reach very big conclusions based on very little data—we would never gain that expertise. However slapdash it might initially seem, this best-guess style of reasoning is critical to human intelligence. In fact, these days, inductive reasoning is the leading candidate for actually being human intelligence.
But score a point for Descartes: inductive reasoning also makes us fundamentally, unavoidably fallible. As I said, the distinctive thing about the conclusions we draw through induction is that they are probabilistically true—which means that they are possibly false. The theory that you should add the suffix “-ed” in order to form a past-tense verb is a brilliant inductive inference. It is largely correct, it teaches you a huge number of words in one fell swoop, and it’s a lot less painful (not to mention a lot more possible) than separately memorizing the past tense of every single verb in the English language. But it also means that sooner or later you are going to say things like drinked and thinked and bringed and runned. Those are trivial errors, and eventually overcome. As we are about to see, however, inductive reasoning is also responsible for some very non-trivial, deeply entrenched mistakes.
Before we look at those specific errors, I want to return briefly to error in general. If the goal of this book is to urge us to rethink our relationship to wrongness, inductive reasoning makes it plain why we should do so. We tend to think of mistakes as the consequence of cognitive sloppiness—of taking shortcuts, cutting corners, jumping to conclusions. And, in fact, we do take shortcuts, cut corners, and jump to conclusions. But thinking of these tendencies as problems suggests that there are solutions: a better way to evaluate the evidence, some viable method for reaching airtight