Browsing a gift shop the other day, I happened on a decorative plaque on which was inscribed a quote attributed to the late “power of positive thinking” guru Norman Vincent Peale: “Change your thinking, and you change your world.” I thought hard about that for several hours and came to the conclusion that Peale was being redundant. A change of thinking doesn’t change the world, and I’m reasonably certain that he wasn’t a humanist, so he really didn’t believe in the idea that each of us constructs our own, equally valid, reality.