ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates with an example, Spinoza's profoundly wrong view that what we ordinarily call error is really a species of ignorance. It involves Spinoza's doctrine of systematic parallelism between the mental and the physical. As well as having to confront the appearance that mentality is distributed unevenly throughout the physical world, Spinoza must also face the fact that within systems that undeniably do have mental and physical aspects there seems to be causal interaction between the two. Spinoza works hard to convince us that what we call error is really a species of ignorance — that it doesn't involve false "ideas" but merely a certain kind of lack of "ideas". Although Spinoza uses the directly-of relation in arguing that "there is nothing positive in ideas by virtue of which they can be called false", when he discusses cases of error, trying to convince us that they don't really involve false beliefs, all his examples involve the indirectly-of relation.
