Collective Errors and Mechanisms of Deception: From John Locke’s Typology of Mistakes to Contemporary Epistemology

Abstract

Since the 20th century, in the field of social epistemology, the collectivist interpretation of the concept oftruth has become a priority over the collectivist one. Thus, it can be said that this was a response to the one-sided egocentric approach promoted by modernism. From this point of view, not only the concept of truth,but also such phenomena as delusion, lie, error, began to be assessed not as a result of the mental operationsof one person, but as an error of society as a whole. In particular, the assessment of truth as a phenomenonthat is not discovered, but created, prompted philosophers to re-analyze the origins of the concept of error, toconsider the role of not only intellectual, but also other forces (religious, political, etc.). In this sense, the ap-proach of John Locke, as one of the first philosophers to emphasize the social and collectivist nature of error,and the expansion of his position and synthesis with the ideas of modern philosophers, is the central argumentof the article. John Locke’s views, giving different types of errors, are mainly contrasted with the ideas ofsuch philosophers as M. Foucault, B. Latour and R. Proctor. The article specifically examines the relation-ships between such concepts as mechanisms of persuasion as sources of errors, active and passive forms ofignorance, agnogenesis, regimes of truth, intellectual laziness and misleading truths. The listed concepts aremainly assessed as methods of deception and means of extracting benefits from deceiving society.