Years ago I got stuck on an extra-linguistic version of this claim that I encountered in Kathryn Schulz’s entertaining and informative book, “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.” Schulz’s assertion, which I would not then have thought to distinguish from Wittgenstein’s, was that “there is no experience of being wrong,” which she elaborated to suggest a kind of paradoxical epistemic bind, where the experience of error can only be understood retrospectively in light of subsequent correction, never subjectively or directly. Ironically, the main reason I was disposed to question Schulz’s claim was that her book elsewhere exhibited a number of remarkable optical illusions, and it struck me that my active belief that, say, a checkerboard square was darker than another under a contrived shading arrangement, easily persisted alongside the certain revealed knowledge that this belief was indeed false. Your examples provide a good way of understanding border situations that complicate updating, but the experience of “believing” a devised illusion even upon and after being enlightened to the trick is relatively common and clear-cut. It certainly feels like a directly accessible first person experience of “believing falsely,” but—half-joking, now—I could be wrong about that.
Years ago I got stuck on an extra-linguistic version of this claim that I encountered in Kathryn Schulz’s entertaining and informative book, “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.” Schulz’s assertion, which I would not then have thought to distinguish from Wittgenstein’s, was that “there is no experience of being wrong,” which she elaborated to suggest a kind of paradoxical epistemic bind, where the experience of error can only be understood retrospectively in light of subsequent correction, never subjectively or directly. Ironically, the main reason I was disposed to question Schulz’s claim was that her book elsewhere exhibited a number of remarkable optical illusions, and it struck me that my active belief that, say, a checkerboard square was darker than another under a contrived shading arrangement, easily persisted alongside the certain revealed knowledge that this belief was indeed false. Your examples provide a good way of understanding border situations that complicate updating, but the experience of “believing” a devised illusion even upon and after being enlightened to the trick is relatively common and clear-cut. It certainly feels like a directly accessible first person experience of “believing falsely,” but—half-joking, now—I could be wrong about that.