Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

Chapter 1 opens by exploring the relatable experience of making a mistake, which evokes feelings like embarrassment and stirs many negative associations like “stupidity,” “indolence,” “psychopathology,” and “moral degeneracy.” However, the author asserts that this “meta-mistake” (5)—being wrong about what it means to be wrong—is our biggest error. This book intends to reveal how, instead, error is vital to human cognition, inseparable from humane qualities such as optimism, and a crucial part of learning and growth.

The author explains that although fallibility is inextricable from the human experience, when we do err, we often deny it, ignore it, or blame someone else. Schulz insists that we, as a culture, have not mastered the ability to say, “I was wrong” (7), despite how frequent and perpetual our mistakes. Here, the author introduces the Pessimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Science, which states that most past scientific theories were eventually discredited, so we must assume that today’s theories will also prove wrong. This principle is broad and extends to all theories, including our own beliefs about the world, which we often replace with new beliefs that will themselves come to be replaced.

Philosophers such as