Illusions

"James Sully was a 19th-century psychologist, a contemporary of William James who was very influenced by Darwin, and I chose his book for two reasons. The first is that there’s a vast literature about wrongness, but very little of it is really categorised as such. If you dig around in philosophy and theology and the history of science and so forth, you find plenty of sidelong reflections on error. But Illusions is that rare book that’s explicitly about wrongness. He uses the term ‘illusions’ very broadly, to cover most things that we would call error – not logical fallacies, but errors of memory and perception and belief. And he’s quite smart about these things, so in part, it’s a wonderful catalogue of all the ways we get things wrong. At the same time, it’s also a wonderful entry in the intellectual history of error, because his way of thinking about wrongness so patently reflects the values and beliefs of his era. That’s why I mentioned Darwin: Sully is powerfully influenced by The Origin of Species and he believes, somewhat touchingly, that we are going to evolve ourselves out of being wrong! And then, too, he has this very 19th-century British colonial view that sees error as largely the province of the heathen – you know, like the more we spread the light of Western culture and knowledge, the more we’ll eradicate error. My interest didn’t come from one massive personal experience of wrongness, although of course I’m wrong all the time. In a way, it was almost the opposite: it came from the fact that the idea of wrongness bubbled up so constantly and in such disparate domains. It simultaneously became clear to me that our attitude toward wrongness influences almost every imaginable human relationship – whether between family members or co-workers or neighbours or nations – and yet we talk about it almost not at all. So I came to think of it as it this hugely important but largely unarticulated category of experience, and I wanted to explore it, to see what happens when we bring it into the light. Yeah, pretty much. I thought about choosing that as one of my books, actually. Wrongness is not a new subject. Philosophy, at least in its earliest years, was all about the quest for truth, and if you want to find truth, you have to be obsessed with error. So there’s plenty of dialogue about wrongness in the philosophical literature, but very little in contemporary public life."