We use tonnes of insults every day. Swearing is a part of our daily language, sometimes just as vital as the use of prepositions. Even when we learn foreign languages, the first words we learn in them are cursing, especially if we are taught by a native speaking friend, rather than by a teacher and a textbook.

One of the most used sorts of insulting is the one that refers to intelligence, or rather lack of it. There are plenty of offensive ways to refer to someone as less intelligent than average, to put it in a formal way. We’ll refer to them as stupid, idiotic, dumb, retarded, thick, imbeciles… The list goes on and on, though not all of those words mean the same, nor have the same origins. This brings us to a problem: What is being dumb in the first place?

Excluding any medical designations of intellectual illnesses, we will only look at what we call dumb on a daily basis. When we refer to some people or actions as silly or stupid, we point out that those are erratic. Doing something stupid is, in essence, making a mistake, or doing something wrong in it’s basis. We can easily see that everything we call idiotic is essentially something that we think is wrong at some point, and it either won’t work, or will be annoying to others around. Therefore, on asking why do we act dumbly, we are really asking: Why do we make mistakes?

A mistake is a wrong action, we all know that, however an action is erratic not when it’s outcome is wrong, but when it’s foundation is. We might make a mistake, and by blind luck, turn up just fine, and on the other side, we might obtain a wrong outcome, yet there were no mistakes involved. It is a mistake to design a bridge that can’t hold itself, but it isn’t building one that works yet it’s broken down by an earthquake soon after. Similarly, an argument is mistaken when it is wrong, and as any of our thoughts is essentially an argument, understanding how an argument can be wrong will tell us how we make mistakes.

Philosophers make a huge remark on what arguments are, how they are built, and when are they wrong. They have two broad classifications for arguments: Deductive, and inductive. Deductive arguments are those who take different premises to obtain a logical conclusion. A classic example is “All humans are mortal, Socrates is a human, therefore, Socrates is mortal”. Deductive arguments are very strong and very well valued in the eyes of philosophers. Inductive arguments, on the other hand, are the extraction of conclusions from recurring data. For example, this is how we scientifically analyse our observations of nature.

Those philosophical arguments can be made wrong in different ways. Excluding a wrong use of logic, deductive arguments can be flawed as soon as one of the premises is wrong, or not taken into account, whilst inductive arguments face the induction problem: Seeing that all cases seen so far, a finite amount of them, behave in one way, doesn’t necessarily imply that every single one of the infinitely many cases will do the same thing. This is how our arguments can become mistaken without becoming illogical at one point.

Any individual acts in a logical way. Some may argue that our brain is no more than a glorified computer, and as any mathematician will assure you, a computer is no more than a collection of data and logic gates, thus all of it’s operations are carried out in a logical way. In other words, we don’t make mistakes because we are illogical in our minds. This doesn’t mean we aren’t irrational, we still have feelings and so on, yet acting according to our feelings is logical, these are logical premises and data we involve in our argument building.

That said, there are three different ways we can make mistakes, and only three, which are the only possible ways deductive and inductive arguments can be flawed. First, because our premises or data is wrong. This affects both kinds of argument and is the cause of most disagreements. Second, because there are premises or data we haven taken into account. This is how we make mistakes such as leaving our keys at home and many others, and again, it involves both kinds of argument. Third and finally, the effects of the induction problem. This is the construction of wrong assumptions from an inductive process. This would be like saying that all cities are in our country, because we have never visited any other cities outside of it. The data is correct there are indeed cities in our country, and these are all we know about, but that doesn’t imply there aren’t any outside of it.

With this classification, we can cover all possible mistakes. Even when something seems to be caused by an illogical procedure, we are really facing a problem of either dismissing premisses, or using false ones. These also bring us that, sometimes, it isn’t that one or the other is wrong, but instead that they have different views, and thus data, on the subject, and they obtain different conclusions. Furthermore, this classification of errors also brings an explanation of the source of stupidity as we discussed before. Stupid actions, now erratic actions, might be caused by a too quick thinking that forgets and dismisses important pieces of information, by taking false data as premises, and by inducing wrong assumptions.

Dumb actions caused by the dismissing of information, or making wrong assumptions, are within human error, and they are part of ourselves. It’s almost natural to forget some things, and the only way to prevent it, is to take a step back and think about our problems more patiently and carefully. However, silly actions caused by having false premises are more of a collective problem than an individual one. They are evidence that we have failed to transmit knowledge between us, or that the one we know is controversial. Though, advanced as we are on the scientific method at the time of obtaining new knowledge and information, perhaps it’s even more of a failure, not of science and other sources of knowledge, but of how we share it.

It’s a problem that reminds us how cautious we have to be about the information we are given from all sources, and how we have to be aware about prejudice and lies. We are stupid when we act stupid, and we act as such only when our thoughts are mistaken, so we need our social efforts to be conducted in teaching how not to be wrong, more than anything.