Please use this thread for discussing Ch. 12: The Twin Pillars of Certainty.
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I don't know whether to agree with you or not about his reaction to Gladwell's book. I read it a few years ago, too. It does seems to me that Gladwell was saying that hunches, intuition, etc. were a type of thought somehow different from that of deliberate thought, but it was rational thought just the same. Burton simply thinks that hunches, etc. bubble up from the unconscious suddenly at times, but that all thought has its origins in the unconscious. It's just a matter of the suddenness. Is it rational? It might well fit that description, but that doesn't necessarily correspond to being objectively true. Gladwell says that such thought is more likely to be "right." (Note: somebody might want to check this--I don't have Burton's book right now, either.) Where Burton really disagrees with Gladwell is when Gladwell says we can somehow harness or enhance our ability to "think without thinking." This would entail, according to Burton, our being able to control what comes up from our unconscious mind, and this he says is biologically impossible, a property of the mythic "autonomous rational mind," but not of the mind we have.JulianTheApostate wrote:Burton seems to have mischaracterized Blink, from what I remember of that book. Gladwell doesn't possess a "deeply rooted desire to believe in the rational mind," as Burton claims. While I won't try to summarize Blink, which I read a few years ago, that book is better written and more convincing than On Being Certain, in part because it has a lot more real-world examples.
I don't know whether to agree with you or not about his reaction to Gladwell's book. I read it a few years ago, too. It does seems to me that Gladwell was saying that hunches, intuition, etc. were a type of thought somehow different from that of deliberate thought, but it was rational thought just the same. Burton simply thinks that hunches, etc. bubble up from the unconscious suddenly at times, but that all thought has its origins in the unconscious. It's just a matter of the suddenness. Is it rational? It might well fit that description, but that doesn't necessarily correspond to being objectively true. Gladwell says that such thought is more likely to be "right." (Note: somebody might want to check this--I don't have Burton's book right now, either.) Where Burton really disagrees with Gladwell is when Gladwell says we can somehow harness or enhance our ability to "think without thinking." This would entail, according to Burton, our being able to control what comes up from our unconscious mind, and this he says is biologically impossible, a property of the mythic "autonomous rational mind," but not of the mind we have.JulianTheApostate wrote:Burton seems to have mischaracterized Blink, from what I remember of that book. Gladwell doesn't possess a "deeply rooted desire to believe in the rational mind," as Burton claims. While I won't try to summarize Blink, which I read a few years ago, that book is better written and more convincing than On Being Certain, in part because it has a lot more real-world examples.