Getting it wrong

 I'm interested in how things are misunderstood, or how mistakes get made.  I think the first thing to consider would be that not understanding reality is the base line.  We really don't know very much in the first place, and are prone to cognitive biases.  

The second thing would be to look at language. We think that language gets us somewhere, but, epistemologically speaking, language is inert. It is only as good as the base line of knowledge. We believe we advance through terminology, but our terms cannot be better than our knowledge.  That's why theological debates seem like pointless semantic exercises that lead us no closer to the truth.  A lot of magical thinking depends on putting a linguistic spin on things. (Language is very good at keeping track of what we do know, though. Definitions are important.)

So we have base line ignorance, and a misguided reliance on language.  

What especially intriguing is error among experts, in the exact area of their expertise, as in the replication crisis in the social sciences.  Error is normal, but there ought to be some gold standard, places in which error becomes exceedingly rare.  

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In the humanities, our research is almost defined by confirmation bias.  We have an intuition taken from reading a literary text. The intuition is a valid piece of information about our own response to the text. Our next step is to bolster the intuition with confirmation from the same text.  We are in the famed hermeneutic circle.  Contrary to what Gadamer argues, most readers won't allow the text to correct them.  They will instead dig in to their reading. The literary text is made of language, so we create a metalanguage to explain it. The rhetorical strength of our writing then convinces other people of the validity of our interpretation.  All of this is fine.  Some intuitions really are better than others, or at least better argued. 

When a certain Lorca scholar sees the 4 palomas in a poem by Lorca as the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, with no apparent evidence.  I want to call that a false form of "knowledge." I want to reject a lot of ways of reading and interpreting, as silly as a podcast claiming that autistic children can do telepathy.  But the only real answer is a kind of epistemic humility: I too am wrong (not always, but ignorance is still the baseline assumption.).