By DOUG SHAVER
June 18, 2020
One of my favorite reads in recent years was Kathryn Schulz's Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. Schulz is not as good a philosopher as she is a journalist, but it was mostly a fun read with mostly accurate reports of recent research on humanity's more or less universal cognitive biases. She is, at least in this field, better than the average science journalist (although that is a distressingly low bar these days).
She begins her first chapter with the rhetorical question,"Why is it so fun to be right?"—as if the answer were not too obvious to need explication. Credit where due, no answer to any question is right just because it's obvious. But if you're going to propose an unobvious answer, then you need to defend it, and I got the impression that she thinks there is no obvious answer, that her question presents a real mystery.
We like being right because we intuitively get it that being wrong can have nasty consequences. There are those in the modern world—or postmodern world, as some would call it—who deny this. We will ignore them for the time being. We want to be right for both utilitarian and ethical reasons. When we're wrong, we might fail to get something we want or lose something we value, or we might cause other people to suffer—sometimes a great many people. Schulz explains all this at some length but seems to wonder whether there might be something more to our aversion to error. It seems to me she's covered all the reasons we could ask for.
Of course she has to say something about the problem of distinguishing truth from error. This gets her into philosophy, and as a journalist she can do little more than report that philosophers have reached no real consensus of the issue. She clearly has some ideas of her own, but I could not discern much more than "I know the truth when I see it, but like everyone else, sometimes I'm wrong."
Much of her book consists of extended anecdotes—case studies, they might be called—about some people who discovered they were very wrong about some very important matters and about how they coped with that discovery. There is an unavoidable redemption motif to the stories. The forgiveness of our victims, even when we get it, doesn't count for much unless we can forgive ourselves. Schulz has much to say about the necessity of accepting our fallibility. But acceptance isn't the same as justification, and Schulz seems inclined to think we should actually be grateful for our susceptibility to error. And I was distressed to learn a few days ago that Neil deGrasse Tyson, of all people, seems to agree with her.
Their argument seems to go like this. Science achieves its progress by discovering its own errors and then correcting them. Therefore, without errors, there would be no scientific progress. But, scientific progress is a good thing, and therefore it is good that we make errors.
OK. Well, medicine is a good thing, but if we never got sick, we would never have invented medicine. Therefore, we should be grateful for sickness.
I don't see how either argument makes any more sense than the other. I cannot help remembering a certain religious apologetic for the existence of evil: our struggles against evil are character-developing, and so without evil, we would not have any strong character. Fine, but the only reason we need strong character is to fight against evil.
The only reason for the existence of modern science is our human fallibility. Science at its core is a set of methods for compensating for our cognitive errors. We would never have needed any science if we had been infallible to begin with. Of course the compensation never works perfectly, but no other method works at all. Error-correction is the glory of science, but to say that is not to glorify error, nor even to excuse it.
I will now be accused of something called scientism. (A few earlier comments on that subject are in my essay About scientism.) The intellectual woods are full of people who assure us that science doesn't have all the answers, that there are other ways of discovering truths. A variation is the claim that there are certain truths not discoverable by the scientific method. Let's assume there are. How do we know, when we've discovered any of them, that they actually are truths? I have seen all of those non-scientific (or shall we call them extra-scientific?) methods recommended by some very intelligent people. So far as I have seen, the verdict in every case is rendered by our feelings. There is a problem with that. As Schulz and many others have pointed out, being wrong feels exactly like being right.
This is not to say that our feelings are irrelevant. We have them, we need them, we cannot get rid of them, and we have to deal with them. But they cannot be the final arbiter of truth. Believing an error can feel wonderful, and while the truth can make us free, it often first makes us miserable.
Some people like to remind us that the truth always hurts. That is patent nonsense, and they must know it. They are sure that they believe certain truths, and believing those truths makes them feel just great. What they're really trying to say is that if we don't like what they're telling us, then it must be because they telling us the truth and we just don't want to hear it.
Could be. Maybe they are telling the truth, and maybe I don't want to hear it. Now, I can verify that I don't want to hear it. Introspection can tell me that much. But introspection won't tell me whether they're telling me the truth. Only their evidence can do that, if they have any. And if they don't have any evidence, then my feelings, as well as theirs, are beside the point.
What is especially beside the point is any feeling of infallibility. The only way we will avoid the coming war is for everyone to negotiate over their grievances, and people who think they cannot be wrong will not negotiate. They can always pretend to negotiate, though, which is why the thugs seem always to win in the short run.
Next: The new witch hunts
(This page last updated on June 18, 2020.)