Confusion: A Study In The Theory Of Knowledge

Excerpt from Joe Camp's "Confusion" After working late one night you walk to your car to drive home. Your car is parked in a dimly lit outdoor parking lot. There are several other cars in the lot. You are tired, and your mind is not really on what you are doing. ... You go up to what you think is your car, and start to insert the key into the door lock. It won't go in. That annoys you, and for a moment you keep wiggling the key in the lock, wondering why it has decided to be so balky. Then you notice the stuffed panda in the back seat. You do not carry a stuffed panda in your back seat. It isn't your car. You look around, and quickly spot your car across the lot, where you now suddenly recall leaving it. ... For a few seconds you thought this car was your car. You confused the two. You took one for the other. ... It is perfectly obvious that when you confuse the car in front of you with your own car, you have made a mistake. Indeed you have made the paradigmatic "mis-take." It is perfectly obvious that you merit intellectual criticism-- some kind of intellectual criticism. ... But it is not perfectly obvious what kind of intellectual criticism you deserve....

Everyone has mistaken one thing for another, such as a stranger for an acquaintance. A person who has mistaken two things, Joseph Camp argues, even on a massive scale, is still capable of logical thought. In order to make that idea precise, one needs a logic of confused thought that is blind to the distinction between the objects that have been confused. Confused thought and language cannot be characterized as true or false even though reasoning conducted in such language can be classified as valid or invalid.

To the extent that philosophers have addressed this issue at all, they take it for granted that confusion is a kind of ambiguity. Camp rejects this notion; his fundamental claim is that confusion is not a mental state. To attribute confusion to someone is to take up a paternalistic stance in evaluating his reasoning. Camp proposes a novel characterization of confusion, and then demonstrates its fruitfulness with several applications in the history of philosophy and the history of science.