"Armadillos may be lured from thickets with soft cheese." Or they may not. But on reading the statement, your brain absorbed the information regardless of its reliability. Even if your conscious mind was promptly flooded with questions about the dietary preferences of armour-plated mammals, the starting point for your internal debate remains the assertion that they are partial to a wedge of brie. You have, like it or not, at some cognitive level, accepted it as true.
The armadillo proposition comes from psychological research conducted in 1990, but is deployed to its best rhetorical effect by Kathryn Schulz in Being Wrong, a new survey of humankind's capacity to be mistaken.
Schulz, a journalist by trade, pitches the book as a sequence of stories that illuminates the range of our fallibility, "adventures in the margin of error". In fact, there is not much narrative and a lot of hardcore epistemology veiled in anecdote. Only gradually does it emerge that Schulz is really trying to answer one of the biggest questions in philosophy: what do we know?
The answer – apologies for the spoiler – is "not much". Descartes was right. I think, therefore I am. So I chalk my own existence up as fact. But as for you, and any claim any of us makes about the universe, well, the jury is out. Actually, the jury is most likely to be corrupt and stupid.
Schulz draws on case studies from history, politics, anthropology, psychology and neuroscience and supports her arguments with quotes from poets and philosophers. She aims to encompass the experience of error in all its guises from the millennial fervour of religious cults to the tiny biases hard-wired in our brains. Hence the cheese-eating armadillo.
The point is not that we're credulous, or suggestible (we are both), but that our liability to err is not remedied by conventional scepticism. Scepticism fails as a model for describing how our minds are made up. Those of us who fancy ourselves as rationalists would claim that we judge new information according to evidence before deciding whether to file it in our minds as truth.
Not so. Schulz shows the extent to which our truth-assessing mechanisms are sabotaged by a conspiracy of prejudices, psychological foibles and anatomical inadequacies. Our senses lie to us, giving us incomplete pictures that our memories then embellish with wild creativity. A lot of what we think we have witnessed at first hand has been shown, in rigorous clinical trials, to be pure fabrication.
We habitually avoid or ignore evidence that contradicts long-held views and tend to believe only the things reported to us by people we like. We reject inconvenient data as lies and propaganda. We are massively susceptible to peer pressure. In one famous test, a group is asked to solve a facile problem, identifying which of three lines is the longest. In fact, all but one in the group are stooges, primed to give the wrong answer. The genuine subject regularly falls in with the consensus. People prefer to be wrong in company than egregiously right.
We also fiercely resist admitting error. That, in Schulz's account, is understandable given how we are culturally trained to despise wrongness and love denial. In the absence of truly reliable facts about the universe, all knowledge is really a kind of belief. ("Belief, with credentials", writes Schulz.) In that context, being wrong incurs a little bit of existential trauma. That is true whether you abandon God, change your politics, or misjudge a relationship. Being dumped has a lot in common, emotionally and cognitively, with losing faith.
The same forces operate on a global scale. Basic assumptions we hold will seem to future generations as incorrect as the idea of the sun revolving around the Earth is wrong to us. Knowledge tends to be superseded by better knowledge. History contains long chapters of terrible knowledge, dark ages in which civilisations indulge stupid ideas about the world and how people ought to treat each other.
There is a moral relativity in that perspective that leads often to nihilism and despair. It has driven many a terrified mind into the reassuring embrace of the divine. But Schulz celebrates error – more specifically humility in the face of error – as one of humanity's greatest achievements. Honest wrongness, she argues, is a precondition for progress.
As a grand theory it is reassuring but not altogether persuasive. Schulz uses a categorical division of "pessimistic" and "optimistic" conceptions of error. The former fears wrongness as moral offence, the latter embraces it as a spur to enlightenment. But optimism and pessimism are tricks of perception with no empirical meaning. They are prejudices we indulge to compensate for lack of certainty. The glass is half air, half water; fullness and emptiness are lies we use to comfort ourselves.
What sounds like a clever device at the start feels flimsy by the end. But few theories could pass through this book's solid epistemological core. It is a courageous achievement to have gazed so long at the Gorgon of human wrongness and then written a book at all, let alone an enjoyable one. Schulz often displays a gift for expressing hard ideas simply, and with humour. She also has the infuriating habit of cruelly labouring ideas, suffocating them under a mound of metaphor. Her introduction is so over-written I thought I would hate the whole book. Appropriately enough, I was wrong.
