Boring, E.G. (1961). Tolerances for Inaccuracy. Contemporary Psychology, 6, 267.

Tolerances for Inaccuracy

E.G. Boring

It is high time for someone to speak out about the social disadvantages of accuracy. For the scientist accuracy is the goal that is never forgotten. It is closely allied to honesty. When economic necessity forces the raw data out of the prime report, there is still the American Documentation Institute which, filing the data, provides absolution for the conscience of the scientist who did not quite tell all. Yet do we not all have acquaintances so "terribly frank" that we wish they could plan some reticences to reduce the jolts of communication?

Actually the ethics of communication can be structured in respect of levels of tolerance for inaccuracy, and surely the scientists should think more about them, in part because they affect what may and what may not be published. CP [Contemporary Psychology] thinks that it can distinguish seven gross levels of this kind of tolerance.

Here they are:

(1) Privileged communication comes first. What the client, the patient, the penitent, or the spouse has said need not be revealed to others by either party to the communication, nor may the court compel it. What one says to oneself is usually also privileged; thought can claim a privacy to which conduct has no right.

(2) Generous inaccuracy is properly found in the exercise of tact and diplomacy. There are many reticences that have survival value in intimate personal affairs as well as international relations. There are also the social amenities which include the "white lie." There is the gracious gesture of the insincere apology, which you utter but do not print. (The apologand may print it though, but he should not. He should have read these paragraphs.)

(3) Casual conversation halts under too much constraint. Some chattering is good, and discreet silence may also be golden even in the home. Because society recognizes the right of privacy, wire-tapping and "bugging" are deplored and in some instances declared illegal. The condoning of inaccuracy is clear in the distinction between talking "off the record" and "for the record." The law requires the warning beep when telephone conversations are being recorded. For similar reasons it was not permissible, until recently, to quote the President of the United States directly. The human right to inaccuracy was so important for the President, whose slightest slip could have enormous effects, that indirect discourse was needed to weaken the guarantee of precision. Lying may be unethical but it is not illegal. Society accepts it and invented the oath to render it illegal on the proper occasions.

(4) The writing of letters produces a record. The fading and distortion of memory traces protect the privacy of conversation, but letters solidify the past. First-class mail is freed from inspection. He who has received a letter owns the paper and ink but not the ideas that they carry. He may not print them without permission, and CP thinks that the owner of the letter should not embarrass the author by asking for permission when the letter was written in friendly correspondence and not intended for publication. Suppose the letter contains a gracious but insincere apology. Must its author be forced to admit disingenuousness or to apologize somewhat insincerely in public? As letters retreat into the past the ethical constraints upon them diminish, for their responsibility -their bearing on changing events- weakens. More and more they become records of human personality or historical evidence for the understanding of the past. Posthumous letters are fairly free for publication unless they diminish the reputation of the author. Fifty years after the author's death, there is not often much reason for the living to hinder publication, and after a century letters pass into the public domain. It is also true that adults feel less fully identified with their childhood letters, less susceptible to injury from a past presumably outlived.

(5) Lectures are, however, another story. Through all his thirty-five years of teaching at Cornell, E.B. Titchener lectured in an Oxford Master's gown, because, he said, "It gives me the right to be dogmatic." And dogmatic he was, charmingly, excitingly, in beautiful English, with never a "hem" or an incomplete sentence. Such inaccuracies as his lovely generalizations contained were soon lost in the noisy channels of memory or in the rubble of students' notes, and he knew that. His writing was carefully protected with modifying clauses. He would never have consented to be taped had that machinery existed then, but is there anyone nowadays who wants his taped lecture published without revision? No, lectures should not be published unless written for publication and read, and it is not an easy task to make the same text attract the ear today and the eye tomorrow. The ear needs more redundancy.

(6) Publication asserts maximal accuracy, and there you accept minimal tolerance. Still even in publication statements of opinion enter. Who would take oath to the accuracy of his book review? In the dissents and counter-dissents that get into CP, values are tried out, and CP thinks that a contemporary equivalent of truth can sometimes be seen emerging. The experimental data must of course be specified as rigorously as possible, yet scientific "truth" is tentative and may change in a dozen or a hundred years. It is not something to take an oath to.

(7) The oath remains largely outside the scientific domain, man's invention of a category for maximal accuracy. It forms in this series the anchorage point in respect of which all other communication is revealed as provisional.

Edwin G. Boring, 1961