Cheerskep >> It does help, but I figured it would be pissy of me to say the likes of, > "Oho! So the only things you'd call 'errors' are "imperfect replications"?
Please don't be sloppy. > When a surgeon cuts off the healthy leg instead of the ailing one maybe you > wouldn't call that an error, or, if you would, I have to ask: where does > imperfect replication come into it? Etc, etc." Since I am not a pissy fellow, I'd > never impute such things to you. Etc, etc. The surgeon looks at the X-rays from the wrong side and erroneously identifies it as the wrong leg. Why did he read the X-ray wrong? Why did his brain or mental processes incorrectly interpret the reversed L? That is an error of imperfect replication, i.e., he did not realize the L was backwards, or he mentally reversed it again to its right-reading state, which amounts to an imperfect replication mentally of the X-ray. I'm using the word "error" to designate every kind of deviation from an exact replica or perfect duplication of a previous state. Why does an opera singer occasionally sing a bad note? Why does a person dial the wrong number? Errors are well known, and there are a lot of disciplines and studies that explain such errors (dyslexia, cross-midline coordination errors, spoonerisms, articulation errors, etc.). I suspect that every form of error or failure arises from the same general fault, namely, an imperfect repeating of an earlier condition. Some are mistakes (error in subtraction), some are judgment errors (the lion underestimates the speed of the gazelle), some are faults of imperfect knowledge (thought the door was open and walked into a glass panel--this happened to me!) or ambiguity (the Nekker cube), some are errors in interpreting sensory stimuli (famously, "Mondegreens") or fallacies. There are probably others, but I can't seem to call them to mind--which is another error, namely, forgetting, and a related error, conflating. So: How do (or did) error come to occur and exist? | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
