Christian Wolff on Error and Ignorance

In Chapter 7 of German Logic, Wolff first describes error. Here, error is dealt with alongside the key epistemological notions of science, belief, and opinion. Three consecutive paragraphs explain, as their titles read, the “origin of error”, the “means to avoid it”, and the source of “the danger of erring.” Hans-Werner Arndt argued that the former paragraph provides a real definition of error, since it shows how an error can take place, whereas Latin Logic provides only a nominal definition of error as “assent given to a false proposition”. The first part of this paper argues that the German and Latin accounts of error are in fact more similar than Arndt suggested. The second part calls into question the claim that what both works say about the origin of error constitutes a real definition. It makes the point that, in order to show how error is possible, something else must be added, something that is provided only by Wolff’s later works. This leads to an assessment of Wolff’s position in the early modern debate on the role of free will in human error and to the highlighting of the enduring influence that the scholastic account of error as a kind of ignorance exerted on Wolff.