We human beings like to think of ourselves as rational beings. It gives us the comforting feeling that there is a method to our madness. Most of our decisions are however based on ‘gut-feel’; the elaborate arguments that we give for them are mostly convenient explanations that we think of after we make up our mind. (To sound intellectual and philosophical, let’s give it the technical name: ex-post facto justification).
I read the book “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking”, by Malcolm Gladwell recently, where the author takes over 200 pages to establish that spontaneous decisions are often as good as - or even better than - carefully planned and considered ones!
So Man is not ill-served by the ‘trust instinct-to-hell-with-logic’ approach, we can all happily continue making random decisions and pretend that we followed a step-by-step logical approach, this process works perfectly well!
Hmmm, but a thought…is it that since we know that this is the process that we follow ( viz of arbitrarily making a decision and then justifying it) we have just found a convenient explanation to establish that that’s actually ok!
Is it just an ex-post facto justification of… well, ex-post facto justification!
I found this uproariously funny, and this is what probably passes off for humour among philosophers ( can’t you just imagine a bunch of white haired men with no fashion sense rolling on the floor laughing while talking of ‘ex-post facto justifications’ and the ‘ad-hominem’ fallacy!).
Which is the sort of reason why philosophers never get laid!
4 comments:
If I find this funny, does it mean I will never get laid?
I vote NOT funny.
Too late my friend- if you already found it funny, you cannot 'ex-post facto' decide that you didn't!
Thou art consigned to a life without getting laid!
Muhahahaha
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
(This does not preclude me from getting laid, btw.)
Dammit, update thyself!.
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