Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

Chapter 9 is devoted to the experience we have when the feeling of being right transforms into the feeling of being wrong. This moment, the author says, is critical to intellectual and moral development and to the reason we despise error and fear it. However, this moment is elusive. What transpires between thinking we are correct and understanding we were wrong is difficult to describe, because our beliefs either alter too slowly or too quickly for us to be able to pin down the actual experience of error.

First, Schulz says that many of our beliefs erode over time, reconfiguring without our recognition. This gradual change is difficult to gauge. Our unreliable memory, she argues, keeps us from isolating the wrongness in these gradual changes or accurately recalling prior beliefs, which causes our mistakes to disappear quietly. Updating the past to align with the present means we do away with the necessity of confronting previous mistakes.

Second, Schulz argues that a sudden change in belief “condenses that experience almost to the vanishing point” (186). Thus, the revelatory experience of being wrong is a simultaneously revelatory experience of encountering new truth. We are thrust past wrongness so rapidly that erring is reduced to something inside us having abruptly changed.

Referring to Thomas Kuhn’s thoughts, the author says that we tend to cling to a belief—or theory—until another, better one comes along. We are absolutely correct about something, Schulz claims, up until the precise moment that we are correct about something else. The author’s point is that we are uneasy in a state of pure wrongness, where we find a belief has fallen apart, and we have nothing with which to replace it. Such a state provokes a strong emotional response of panic and anguish. We fear that we lack the ability to regain our footing in the world. Thus, the world seems uncertain—but so does the self.

This state of uncertainty, however, can also cause us to see the vast expanse of the world anew. We can explore a grand new space both within and beyond. This can inspire real change, as what we would observe at the moment of error has change at its core. This change in the face of erring is “the place where we destroy and rebuild ourselves” (192).

Isolating the precise moment of error, Schulz argues, has much to do with context—what is occurring around and within us. This boils down to two points: how much we are shielded from or exposed to information that challenges our beliefs and whether those around us make it difficult or easy to accept our errors.

Wrongness, Schulz concludes, is ultimately about the emotions the experience provokes and our aversion to those negative feelings. The capability of admitting that we are wrong, she says, is dependent upon our ability to tolerate the aversive emotions. This ability can be cultivated, but doing so entails substituting openness in place of defensiveness and intimacy in place of distance.