We will re-engineer something a thousand times before we will re-think it.
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We never have time to think, because we have so much to do. We have so much to do, because we never take time to think.
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We refuse to think about what we find difficult to think about.
Q: What makes something difficult to think about?
A: When rethought is required before a problem can be thought at all.
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When something is easy to think about, we will think it with boundless energy. We will happily overthink when overthinking is easy.
We will continue to overthink it especially when this thinking stops working.
The less effective our line of thought becomes the more rigorously we think it.
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In an attempt to make ourselves understood to someone who does not know English, we will sometimes speak English more and more loudly.
Likewise, in an attempt to solve a problem with an unsuitable approach, we will often apply that approach with greater and greater rigor.
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But isn’t thought just following the consequences of observed reality to its logical conclusion?
This belief is known as “naive realism” by those who know better, and “objectivity” by those savvy characters who know better than to listen to those who know better.
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Between thought and rethought is a gap of perplexity, where we become so disoriented we can’t even produce questions, much less answers.
This gap is painful to everyone, and intolerable to all but a few perverse, marginalized souls who live to cross it.
The way across perplexity is the practice of philosophy.
Wittgenstein: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.'”
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Part of me hates to say any of this out loud: As soon as people intuit philosophy’s true value they will have to recast themselves as philosophers. Everyone will compete to be the most philosophical philosopher, and due to the peculiar nature of philosophy, everyone will achieve this status. (Few will realize victory is guaranteed, since every profound insight is the final and greatest insight, and everything that is not subsumed by it is irrelevant.) The world will overflow with philosophers, and all anyone will talk about is philosophy. Then the fad will end, and philosophy will be shown to have made little difference.
I think Wittgenstein’s idea of finding our way among various forms of life is to look at action in context; within the form of life in which it is embedded. It not that analysis is not helpful, but the farther it gets from context the less helpful it becomes. Analysis, at times, can blind us to what is happening right in front of our eyes. Vygotsky (via Kozulin’s Introduction to Thought and Language) described a common situation where an empirical finding begets a theory that grows to takeover a discipline and next becomes a universal principle for all disciplines; at which time it will collapse out the enormous intellectual weight it tries to bear. Think of the discovery of reinforcement, leading to Skinner’s brand of behaviorism, that becomes the core principle of all psychology and is extended to all of the social sciences like management. Philosophical (dear I say design) thinking in Wittgensteinian terms must constantly return to context, to understand it within its embedded form of life. It is also the nature of the closely related dialogic thinking I associate with M.M. Bakhtin. Part of the meaning of any word is linked to a specific use in a dialogue. We must interpret it within the dialogue to get at the complete meaning.
Howard,
Thanks for your thoughtful comments.
I agree with everything you are saying here. Over the years I’ve become more and more excited about the power of social research, especially field research, as a tool for organizations (and by organization I mean the extended organization, which includes customers and other external stakeholders) to improve their political health. The fact that it turns up true information is wonderful, but I’ve come to see the truth content as most valuable as something that helps the research win acceptance so it can have its therapeutic effect.
I also like that you connect philosophical thought with design thinking. That’s one of my core convictions.
I’ve added your blog to Google Reader. I look forward to more dialogue in the future.
Stephen