Être tenu par son erreur : les conséquences du fait de setromper. Un exemple à partir du Don Quichotte de Schütz

Can we emerge unscathed from our errors ? In taking a path sketched out in recent research on the fact of being wrong that distances itself from a purely cognitivist understanding, this article seeks to explore what an error does to the person who makes it. The hypothesis that is developed, following Wittgenstein, is that every act, every cognitive content that ends up being described as error has “a hold” on the person and risks having consequences on the way the error’s author will be able to involve him/herself in the world. Hence it is possible to propose a classification of errors according to the rearrangement which they imply in the system of what the person knows, believes and lives. In further investigating this hypothesis, the article relies on A. Schutz’s celebrated text entitled Don Quixote and the Problem of Reality (Don Quichotte et le problème de la réalité). Therein the phenomenologist analyses how Cervantes’ fanciful hero, an extreme figure compared to our everyday selves, arranges things so as to go on living in his sub-universe of chivalry thanks to a benevolent environment, but also how the self-proclaimed knight is inescapably brought around to describing everything he knows, believes or lives as erroneous - once the world around him becomes confrontational