We idealize everybody’s thinking, and even our own access to reasons, blithely attributing phantom bouts of clever reasoning to ourselves after the fact. We tend to see what we chose to do (a chess move, a purchase, parrying a blow) to have been just the right move at the right time, and we have no difficulty explaining to ourselves and others how we figured it out in advance, but when we do this we may often be snatching a free-floating rationale out of thin air and pasting it, retrospectively, into our subjective experience.
