“Post Event” definition disorder

Well this is going to be a left field post fitting into the “other loosely related” category.

I was reading some Q & A of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, and the answer to the question to question three got me thinking about explanations. The question heading on the website was;

In what way are our explanations of success “crude”?

Well this got me thinking about how an explanation is formed. Often after (post ) an event ,we as individuals, or collectively as a a group, try to make sense of the event through a definition of what happened and how it happened, from this definition then comes the explanation of the “what” or the “how”.

Now the really intriguing question I have is this? Does the definition and therefore the explanation based on this definition bear any relationship or have in it any correlation to what actually happened ?

In some cases, Yes. In others the explanation is based on a definition assumed, therefore is just that, an assumption.

Now what is that assumption based on. Is it culture, upbringing, past experience, our personal world view, religious belief, in fact it could be all or some of the of the above.

So thinking on this further I thought that is the explanation of a defined or perceived or assumed definition is not based on hard and quantifiable facts that are sterile from assumptions and the nuances of personal belief, then do we have a “definition disorder” that can affect either the individual or the group as a whole.

Try a debate on a controversial topic some time post an event and see where people are at, they will tend to polarise, interesting!

But then again, maybe my definition and explanation is a manifestation of the disorder itself.

;-)