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.