![]() 5 This context was one of mutual reinforcement, and the metaphorical slippage between psychology and evolution partly explains the hybrid vigor of the concept of “trial and error” from the 1850s onward. 4 Once evolutionary theories gained traction, implications for the study of mind and brain were among their primary loci of application and anxiety. As I have argued elsewhere, theories rooting scientific method in the human mind-theories authored by figures such as John Herschel, William Whewell, and John Stuart Mill-had helped to frame the early evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, among others. These contexts were psychology and evolutionary theory, and the simultaneity of the phrase's appearance there was no accident. 3īy the mid-nineteenth century, the phrase “trial and error” could be found in two new contexts, often with scare quotes highlighting its novelty. This worked perfectly well in a pedagogical context, and the term “trial and error” began to appear in astronomical, mathematical, and mechanics textbooks in the mid-eighteenth century. ![]() 2 Far from our current meaning of “trial and error”-as a somewhat haphazard system of guess-and-check-the “Rule of False” was both certain and limited, of use only on linear problems in which variables were defined and an answer was assured. The term first emerged in the eighteenth century as a synonym for an ancient arithmetic approach known as the “Rule of Position,” the “Rule of False Position,” or simply the “Rule of False.” The rule worked, according to an arithmetic manual from 1764, by taking “a supposition of false numbers as if they were true ones,” deriving an outcome, comparing that outcome to the desired one, and, via a ratio, computing the “true” number in a single step. Prior to the Victorian period, “trial and error” was a mathematical tool. If “to err is human,” then to try is, too. Throughout, I aim to dissolve distinctions-between knowledge and action, or theory and practice-that have been tacitly endorsed by our historiographical divisions for too long. At this essay's end, I suggest a few ways in which the history of bounded rationality prompts us to take stock of our own limits. If theorists of bounded rationality (broadly defined) are themselves bounded in ways that are patterned and explicable, then it stands to reason that their historians are too. My third, provisional key is more reflexive. This is bounded rationality in a second key: the history of “trial and error” exemplifies what the psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has called the “tools-to-theories” heuristic, to which I return below. ![]() Biologists and psychologists wielded the phrase in particular ways that placed bounds on their own efforts in turn. Of course, this sense of “trial and error” did not arise on its own-theories never do. Their view of the mind as piecemeal and adaptive rose to challenge orthodoxies of certitude. First, there is the sense in which early theorists of “trial and error” were describing limited cognition. The story plays out in two-or, perhaps, three-keys. At its heart, it is a story about reasoning and its limits. The transformation of “trial and error” is the subject of this essay. This sense of “trial and error” soon took hold in a range of fields and among the wider public. The burgeoning fields of scientific psychology and evolutionary biology gave new meaning to “trial and error”: as both a theory of learning and an account of transmutation, the process came to seem both haphazard and bounded. Beginning around 1850, this began to change. Before the Victorian period, “trial and error” had a much more restricted meaning in mathematics and pedagogy. All are-or can be-pursued by the method of “trial and error.” 1 However, this was not always the case. ![]() Today, we think nothing of using the same phrase to describe scientists testing hypotheses, children learning to spell, and rats solving puzzles, not to mention computerized search, immune system response, and public policy interventions. This symbiosis is captured in the career of the phrase “trial and error,” which in the nineteenth century came to stand for a general give-and-take process characteristic of a whole range of phenomena. Trying invites failing errors follow attempts.
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