Stumbling on Happiness Gilbert's Argument Research Paper

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However, Gilbert fails to adequately demonstrate this trait as universal. His other postulations are better-grounded than the concept of presentism for this reason.

On page 123 in his Jetsons-like vision of the future, he mentions FedEx. This is an example of a situation where presentism does not exist. The company was not founded to expand on an existing concept; it was founded to build an entirely new vision from the ground up. You can see this when radically-new governments replace old ones, as occurred with the Communist takeover of Cuba or the fundamentalist takeover of Iran. Gilbert's theory of presentism fails to account for the many occurrences in history where the future is envisioned as something radically different than the present. Moreover, these radically different visions can also come true, as was the case for FedEx and Iran, albeit not for Cuba. Examples like these run against his theory that while we may be able to imagine something completely unrealistic we have difficulty imagining something realistic but dramatically different from present reality.

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Gilbert's discussion of presentism relies heavily on anecdotes that ring hollow or are unsupported, or on studies that undoubtedly do not yield universal results. This undermines the strength of his argument. For some people, the mind does not work in this way. The future may or may not be envisioned as being dramatically different than the present. Gilbert discounts this possibility simply because come people do not have the capacity to envision the future creatively. Yet this notion fails because he does not accept that for many individuals these generalizations do not hold true. Further, he ignores this fact for the convenience of creating an argument, when he should examine it to see where that takes his argument.

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