Thinking

The thought (taken at Reims, France)

Actually, it’s strange. Philosophizing is thinking, but how many philosophers ask themselves what thinking is? How many philosophers wonder what they do, when they think? Of course, there are philosophers who do or did. However, I have never done, neither here in my blogs, nor in other writings. So, it’s time to fill this gap.
According to the Wikipedia “Thought (or thinking) encompasses an ‘aim-oriented flow of ideas and associations that can lead to a reality-oriented conclusion’ ”. But it immediately adds that “there is still no consensus as to how it is adequately defined or understood.” So, I’ll not try to give here a definition of the phenomenon. I’ll immediately jump to the question what it practically involves. In answering this question, I’ll follow Michael Tomasello in his A natural history of human thinking, pp. 27-31. Although he doesn’t tell us what philosophical thinking involves, he leads us to the foundation of thinking as we practice it in daily life. And isn’t this also the foundation of all specialist ways of thinking?
According to Tomasello, thinking has three key components:
1) “The ability to work with some kind of abstract cognitive representations, to which the individual assimilates particular experiences” (p. 27)
2) “The ability to make inferences from cognitive representations”. (28)
3) “The ability to self-monitor the decision-making process”. (30)
Let me explain these components more in detail. In doing so I follow Tomasello, without saying so each time.

Ad 1) Cognitive representations are things like categories, schemas and models. They have three features. They are iconic or imagistic. So, as I interpret this, they refer or point to what they are about. As Tomasello says, What else could they be? In addition, such representations are schematic. They are generalizations or abstractions of the reality as the thinker sees it. The latter makes that the representations are the thinker’s interpretations; they are not reality as such. Moreover, the cognitive representations are situational: They “have as their most basic content situations, specifically, situations that are relevant to the individual’s goals and values.” (27)
Ad 2) Thinking is not only a matter of having cognitive representations, but it involves also making inferences from these representations to what does not exist, does not yet exist or what does exist but is or can not be perceived by the thinker at the moment s/he is thinking about it. These inferences can be causal and intentional and have a logical structure (understanding of cause-effect relations; understanding of logical implications, negation, and the like). They can also be productive in the sense that the thinker can generate off-line situations in her mind and infer or imagine nonactual situations. (28-30)
Ad 3) The ability to self-monitor is more than just taking decisions and anticipating the consequences of these decisions, but it is the ability to decide what one needs to take a decision and whether the information one has is sufficient. It’s a kind of ‘executive’ oversight of the decision process (3). 

Actually what Tomasello discusses in these pages (27-31) refers to the thinking of the great apes. It’s an introduction to the way how great ape thinking developed into human thinking. I must say that in my summary of these pages I haven’t followed Tomasello exactly but I have already anticipated the human thinking and given some of its characteristics. What especially was added to the human thinking was recursive thinking in any shape: thinking about oneself; thinking about one’s own thinking; thinking of the thinking of others and that these others think about you, etc. Also thinking intentionally has further developed. Moreover, human thinking is perspectival: The ability to see others and the world in general through the eyes of another person or from an objective point of view.
To my mind the summary of thinking that I have described above gives a good insight into the basics of the way humans think. Here I want to stress yet especially two important aspects of this human thinking: Its schematical aspect (humans think in schemas or broad categories that structure their worlds) and the typical human recursive aspect of thinking that humans think about thinking. Isn’t this what philosophers do?

Sources
- “Thought”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought
- Tomasello, Michael, A natural history of human thinking. Cambridge, Mass. Etc.: Harvard University Press, 2014.