Thinking and the Nature of thought

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A Theory of Thinking?

One of the central goals of philosophical and scientific research today is the development of a good theory of thinking. For some researchers in both philosophy and the sciences, such a theory would be part of a larger theory of consciousness, also referred to as the “problem of consciousness.” The problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining the relationship between what is happening in our brains and our conscious awareness, our minds. Though we know much more about the brain and the functioning of its 10^12 neurons than we did even 15 years ago, there are still plenty of mysteries about the relationship between neurological activity and conscious experience.

Of course, for long stretches of recorded thought in the West, the main way of solving this problem was to deny that there is a close and complete physical relationship between the mind and the body. Historically, people have behaved that the mind is primarily governed by spiritual processes, while the brain is part of our “animal” nature. This way of thinking still has many adherents and since no unified theory of consciousness has won wide acceptance, one must keep an open mind. However, a great mass of evidence now supports the dominant intuition most researchers have today, which is that the brain is the mind, so a good theory of consciousness will result from a complete understanding of the brain and the means by which it produces experience. Fortunately, our question is a bit narrower than the problem of consciousness. Can any of the natural sciences. Such as neurology, or the abstract sciences, such as logic, tell us anything about the nature of thought that will help us in our quest to become more reflective thinkers?

If you are looking for direct evidence of particular structures of the brain that govern “logical” thought processes, you will probably be disappointed. It might be comforting to hope that you could verify that you were thinking logically by knowing that a certain part of your brain was active, but there is very little reason to think that that is the way thinking operates in the brain. New imaging tools like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allow us to observe changes in brain functioning that are connected to changes in blood flow within the brain. The fMRI is a big advance in neurology and neuropsychology in part because it allows us to get images every couple of seconds while asking test subjects to do various things. It also turns out to be important to “neurophilosophers,” – philosophers and neuroscientists who are trying to use neuroscience to speculate on a general theory of consciousness – just as the telescope was important to 16th and 17th century natural philosophers. Using imaging tools like the fMRI, we can correlate P’ person reports of the test subject’s consciousness (such as “I think . . .,” “I feel see. . .”) with 3’’’ person (objective) data about their brains. In a 1’’ person report, for example, we get actual answers from the test subject to questions that require various kinds of cognition or feeling. The fMRI gives objective information about blood flow in the brain during the time that the subject is being studied.

Do these kinds of studies tell us anything interesting about thinking? Are we developing a theory of thinking now that we can observe brain function as never before? Not directly. But if you ask a variety of subjects the same kinds of questions and notice that different or overlapping areas of each subject’s brain “lights up,” you might be able to make inferences about how thinking is or is not localized in the brain. This information can be combined with what we have learned from patients with specific brain abnormalities such as lesions, to help us speculate about how the “work” of thinking is divided and executed in a conscious brain. Interestingly enough, not only does there appear to be no “logic center” of the brain, but there appears to be no one center of brain activity associated with cognitive functioning in general. We have known for some time, mostly from the evidence of patients with localized damage to their brains, that language abilities are, to a great extent, localized in “Broca’s Area” and that damage in this area can block various kinds of inferences from being made. We also know that in actual argumentative discussion, many areas of the brain are activated, including regions of the prefrontal lobe which regulate emotions. There is some evidence that the left side of the prefrontal lobe is more involved with reasoning than the right and, interestingly, that area is also more active during experiences of positive emotions. Intuitively, we know that negative emotions can impair cognitive functions, and research has corroborated this. So, we might draw a tentative conclusion that good reflective practitioners should be aware of the way emotions are triggered in themselves and others during discussions and that attending to and responding to emotions during a discussion can affect the quality of that discussion.

While this connection between emotions and reasoning is interesting and suggestive for our thinking about how to relate to others and how we should monitor our emotions during discussion, it does not really yield a “theory of thinking.” Another place where you might think a “theory of thinking” could develop is the study of logic. In fact, when many people think of rational argumentation, they think of characters like Mr. Spock from the old Star Trek television series. Spock was both an ideal of our stereotype of logical thinking, and, at the same time, a parody of it. Many episodes of Star Trek either tried to show that humans were worse off because their emotions blocked strictly “logical” thinking or that Spock sometimes failed to understand a situation completely because he couldn’t empathize and experience emotions like a human.

Should we hold Mr. Spock up as an ideal? Could a theory of thinking be based on the abstract science of logic? There is no question that becoming a better reflective practitioner requires a practical knowledge of logic. Logicians have developed a specialty within philosophy by showing how abstraction from the content of an argument can lead us to insights about various forms of thought.

But at this point, while we are still coming to an understanding of the whole enterprise of becoming a reflective thinker, we should note some reasons why logic cannot be the basis of a theory of thinking. Logicians can tell us many things about the form of thought: how to spot and avoid contradictions, how different kinds of logical patterns can form a reliable chain of reasoning, and how to spot and avoid specific kinds of failures of reasoning. But most of what logicians can tell us about, as important as it is, concerns relationships among claims – statements that are either true or false. Logicians do not have much to say about the discovery of truths and they have even less to say about how reflective discussions operate. A knowledge of logic is essential to good, truth-seeking, reflective discussion in roughly the same way that mathematics is crucial to many of the physical sciences. Without the ability to quantify observations and relationships science is lost. Without attention to argument forms, which we will discuss in the coming chapters, your discussions may lack precision and rigor. Likewise, if you cannot express yourself in a logical manner, you will probably not be able to think through complex problems. On the other hand, a familiarity with math does not guarantee success in science. The same is true about the relationship between logic and good philosophy or good reflective discussion.

Since we have set for ourselves the task of becoming good reflective practitioners, effective participants in careful rational deliberations, we should try to give ourselves a model of thinking that explains why the contributions of neuroscience and logic, valuable as they are, do not quite get at the nature of reflective activity.

Here are three steps toward that explanation, three “levels” on which thinking operates which, if the claims made here are true, suggest both the complexity of our topic and the reasons why Mr. Spock does not always get the right answer.,

First, thinking is a social activity. Logic aside for a moment, many norms of rational thought (what counts as a good reason, what degree of questioning of tradition is important or allowed, what counts as “being reasonable,” etc., are governed by both universal and local goals and norms of human social interaction. For example, in cultures that value tradition a great deal, one will be considered unreasonable or even irrational to question basic beliefs in the culture’s tradition. One might even be burnt at the stake for doing so. Local norms also affect our view of reasonableness. Intercultural differences between. For example, Mediterranean cultures and Anglo-Saxon cultures often lead the members of the latter cultures to consider members of the former as “too emotional” or not logical. Most differences like this require interpretation to understand and cannot be settled with logic alone. For example if you have your house remodeled in Italy, it might be “reasonable” for the contractor not to give you a precise and binding estimate for the work. After all, he or she might say, who knows how much it will cost? Most people in the U.S. would find that unreasonable. Cultural variations and variations among individuals within a culture will inevitably affect the kind of reflective interactions we have with others.

Take a minute to think about the difference between being “reasonable” and being “rational.” We typically say that someone is being irrational if they contradict themselves or if they deny that basic logical inferences are valid. Reasonableness, however, is much hard to specify because it refers more to values that operate in a local context or culture and different weight people attach to their various experiences.

This variation does not necessarily mean that “rationality” and “reasonableness” are whatever we say it is or whatever a culture says it is. The way individuals and cultures construct their “norms of rationality” probably represent their best guess about how to have successful, truth-oriented discourse. How objective are “norms of rationality?” That turns out to be a big topic of conversation in philosophy today. It is referred to as the questions of “relativism.”

A second level on which thinking operates is individual reflection. We have all known people who appear to us to have “thought things through” more than others. Even when we do not agree with their conclusions, we can usually identify people who appear not to have come to their conclusions lightly and who have a more, rather than less, orderly way of connecting their various views. Whether the individual thinker’s habits of thought integrate well with their culture and social world or not, there is a dynamic to being a reflective thinker that is different from the social dimension of thought discussed earlier. One sign of this is that follow paths in our private reflections that help make us who we are and form in us an intellectual and psychological temperament that affects how we enter into reflective discourse with others.

The third level on which thinking occurs is the hardest to characterize, but in some ways the most important. When we say that a point of view or belief has its own “logic” we might mean that there are logical relationships among the various parts of the view that are in tension with the world in various ways.

This might be easier to see in some big examples so consider the following: As the geocentric view of the world became accepted, or, in our own day, as we work through the implications of Darwinian thinking, large areas of our belief systems are stressed. To say that they have a “logic” means that, like a partially solved Rubric’s cube, they can be moved some ways more easily than others. Big ideas like relativity, the geocentric view of the universe, or Darwinism, have their own logic, but they also require us to adjust other beliefs and theories according to the logic inherent in them.

As strange as it might sound at first, thinking “operates” within the thought structure of our ideas and theories themselves, making some kinds of adjustments to new ideas more likely or easier to affect than others. Here the skills of logic can help tremendously. The logician comes to reflective discourse like a visitor to a game of chess in progress. He or she surveys the landscape of positions, finds tight relationships among ideas, see vulnerabilities in the positions of the pieces, and can often suggest new moves.

We can summarize our explanation of the three levels on which thinking operates by continuing our chess analogy. Our Spock-like visitor to the game might evaluate new moves strictly on the basis of the goals of the game itself. This is a focus on the third level of thought in which we just pay attention to the logic of the position being discussed. But knowing one’s own habits and thinking and being self-aware about one’s own style of play (what we identified as the second level of reflective activity) help one become a complete player. Being aware of your own tendencies and biases can help you think more clearly game and one’s own style of play exist within a social world of chess players, traditions of play, and different ways of thinking about strategy, is analogous to the way thinking operates in a social world.

Like any analogy, this one has its limits. The outcomes of most reflective activity are not as discrete and easily evaluated as a checkmate, draw, or stalemate. Much of our thought about personal matters has its outcome in personal decisions and habits which may or not contribute to our happiness or some other good outcome. Our reflections on public matters like whether to go to war, whether marijuana should be legal or whether same sex couples should be allowed to marry, has its outcome in public policies and laws the effect of which may be hard to evaluate. But the goal of our discussion has simply been to provide a sense of the complexity of thought, and a view of the levels on which it operates. Because thought operates on social, individual, and content levels, you should not be surprised to find that this book focuses sometimes on the social pragmatics of reflective discussion, sometimes on the individual reflective process of considering a position, and sometimes just on the position itself and its logic.