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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
ZHOU Zhifa
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5313/2026.05.005
Zhejiang Normal University, Zhejiang, China
This article takes error-tolerant political philosophy as its theoretical point of departure and, together with error-tolerant economics and error-tolerant pedagogy, develops a genetic account of the formation of social relations. Error-tolerant political philosophy introduces trial and error into the analysis of the state of nature and advances the concepts of trial-and-error interdependence, the right to trial and error as a primordial right, and reciprocal empowerment, explaining why actors cannot be epistemically and practically self-sufficient and how qualifications to engage in trial-and-error practices acquire social recognition. Error-tolerant economics examines how trial-and-error costs, trial-and-error competence, trial-and-error direction, and the primordial right to trial and error shape the allocation of trial-and-error opportunities before and during the formation of differences in wealth, identity, and status. Error-tolerant pedagogy examines how knowledge, experiences of error, and effective methods generated through trial-and-error practices become social knowledge through preservation and intergenerational transmission. Together, these approaches raise a distinct sociological question: how do actors with limited knowledge and capacities, bound by trial-and-error interdependence, form relatively enduring social relations as they jointly confront and address shared problems, and how do those relations acquire relative stability through repeated practice and further give rise to norms, organizations, institutions, and social structures? On this basis, the article proposes error-tolerant sociology, with trial-and-error interdependence as its genetic point of departure, to explain the formation and structuring of social relations and the emergence of social structures.
genetic reconstruction, trial-and-error interdependence, primordial right to trial and error, subject formation, error-tolerant sociology
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