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18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 1. Thought

[intentional activity of the mind]

31 ideas
For Empedocles thinking is almost identical to perception [Empedocles, by Theophrastus]
     Full Idea: Empedocles assumes that thinking is either identical to or very similar to sense-perception.
     From: report of Empedocles (fragments/reports [c.453 BCE], A86) by Theophrastus - On the Senses 9
     A reaction: Not to be sniffed at. We can, of course, control our thinking (though we can't control the controller) and we contemplate abstractions, but that might be seen as a sort of perception. Vision is not as visual as we think.
The attainment of truth is the task of the intellectual part of the soul [Aristotle]
     Full Idea: The attainment of truth is the task of both the intellectual parts of the soul (calculation and deliberation).
     From: Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics [c.334 BCE], 1139b10)
     A reaction: Obviously true, I would have thought, and equally true of the evolved brain, though there are plenty of people out there who try to deny it.
We must first conceive things before we can consider them [Reid]
     Full Idea: No man can consider a thing which he does not conceive.
     From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Intellectual Powers 5: Abstraction [1785], 6)
     A reaction: This seems to imply concepts, but we should not take this to be linguistic, since animals obviously consider things and make judgements.
A pure concept of the understanding can never become an image [Kant]
     Full Idea: The schema of a pure concept of the understanding is something that can never be brought to an image at all.
     From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B181/A142)
     A reaction: Interesting. He is thinking of triangles, for example. The emphasis is on 'pure', and this is a nice defence of the notion of 'pure reason'. Obviously you wouldn't understand a triangle if you were incapable of imagining one.
A thought is as real as a cannon ball [Joubert]
     Full Idea: A thought is a thing as real as a cannon ball.
     From: Joseph Joubert (Notebooks [1800], 1801)
     A reaction: Nice. The realisation of a thought can strike someone as if they have been assaulted, and hearing some remarks can be as bad as being stabbed. That is quite apart from political consequences. Joubert is good on the physicality of thinking.
The act of thinking is the bringing forth of universals [Hegel]
     Full Idea: Thinking as an activity is the active universal, and indeed the self-actuating universal, since the act, or what is brought forth, is precisely the universal.
     From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Logic (Encyclopedia I) [1817], §20)
     A reaction: One should contemplate animal thought in the light of this remark. Thought requires the recognition of types of things, and resemblances, and repetitions, and patterns. Language consists almost entirely of universals.
People who think in words are orators rather than thinkers, and think about facts instead of thinking facts [Nietzsche]
     Full Idea: Whoever thinks in words thinks as an orator and not as a thinker (it shows that he does not think facts, but only in relation to facts).
     From: Friedrich Nietzsche (On the Genealogy of Morals [1887], III.§08)
     A reaction: Good. It is certainly not true that we have to think in words, or else animals wouldn't think. Good thinking should focus on reality, and be too fast for words to keep up.
Thought is the same everywhere, and the laws of thought do not vary [Frege]
     Full Idea: Thought is in essentials the same everywhere: it is not true that there are different kinds of laws of thought to suit the different kinds of objects thought about.
     From: Gottlob Frege (Grundlagen der Arithmetik (Foundations) [1884], Intro)
     A reaction: Different kinds of thinker might also be candidates for different laws of thought. I'm unsure of Frege's grounds for this claim; most continental philosophers would probably reject it.
Many people have the same thought, which is the component, not the private presentation [Frege]
     Full Idea: The same thought can be grasped by many people. The components of a thought, and even more so the things themselves, must be distinguished from the presentations which in the soul accompany the grasping of a thought.
     From: Gottlob Frege (Review of Husserl's 'Phil of Arithmetic' [1894], p.325)
     A reaction: This is the basic realisation, also found in Russell, of how so much confusion has crept into philosophy, in Berkeley, for example. Frege starts down the road which leads to the externalist view of content.
Thoughts have their own realm of reality - 'sense' (as opposed to the realm of 'reference') [Frege, by Dummett]
     Full Idea: For Frege, thoughts belong to a special realm of reality, which he called the 'realm of sense' and distinguished from the 'realm of reference'.
     From: report of Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918]) by Michael Dummett - Thought and Reality 1
     A reaction: A thought is, for Frege, a proposition. There is a halfway Platonism possible here, where the 'realm' for such things exists, but within that realm the objects might be conventional, or some such. Real possible worlds containing fictions!
A thought is distinguished from other things by a capacity to be true or false [Frege, by Dummett]
     Full Idea: On Frege's view, what distinguishes thoughts from everything else is that they may meaningfully be called 'true' and 'false'.
     From: report of Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918]) by Michael Dummett - Frege philosophy of mathematics Ch.2
     A reaction: A lot of thinking is imagistic, and while the image may or may not truly picture the world, we tend to think that the truth or otherwise of daydreaming is simply irrelevant. Does Frege take all thought to be propositional?
We grasp thoughts (thinking), decide they are true (judgement), and manifest the judgement (assertion) [Frege]
     Full Idea: We distinguish the grasp of a thought, which is 'thinking', from the acknowledgement of the truth of a thought, which is the act of 'judgement', from the manifestation of this judgement, which is an 'assertion'.
     From: Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918], p.329 (62))
Thought is an activity which we perform by the expression of it [Wittgenstein]
     Full Idea: Thought is an activity which we perform by the expression of it, and lasts as long as the expression.
     From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Lectures 1930-32 (student notes) [1931], B VIII)
     A reaction: I take this to be an outmoded view of thought, which modern cognitive science has undermined, by showing how little of our thinking is actually conscious.
The mind is imprisoned and limited by language, restricting our awareness of wider thoughts [Weil]
     Full Idea: At the very best, a mind is enclosed in language is in a prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve the combination of a greater number.
     From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.89)
     A reaction: This seems to be a germ of the type of view of language which blossoms in Derrida. But she is on to something. None of us grasp fully, I think, the non-linguistic nature of good thinking.
Recognition must precede the acquisition of basic concepts, so it is the fundamental intellectual process [Price,HH]
     Full Idea: Recognition is the first stage towards the acquisition of a primary or basic concept. It is, therefore, the most fundamental of all intellectual processes.
     From: H.H. Price (Thinking and Experience [1953], Ch.II)
     A reaction: An interesting question is whether it is an 'intellectual' process. Animals evidently recognise things, though it is a moot point whether slugs 'recognise' tasty leaves.
A theory of thought will include propositional attitudes as well as propositions [Dummett]
     Full Idea: A comprehensive theory of thought will include such things as judgement and belief, as well as the mere grasp of propositions.
     From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 4)
     A reaction: This seems to make any theory of thought a neat two-stage operation. Beware of neatness. While propositions might be explained using concepts, syntax and truth, the second stage looks faintly daunting. See Idea 2209, for example.
The theories of meaning and understanding are the only routes to an account of thought [Dummett]
     Full Idea: For the linguistic philosopher, the theory of meaning, and the theory of understanding that is built upon it, form the only route to a philosophical account of thought.
     From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 4)
     A reaction: I am of the party that thinks thought is prior to language (esp. because of animals), but Dummett's idea does not deny this. He may well be right that this is the 'only route'. We can only hope to give an account of human thought.
'Tacit theory' controls our thinking (which is why Freud is important) [Derrida]
     Full Idea: All thought is controlled by tacit theory (which is why Freud is so important).
     From: Jacques Derrida (works [1990]), quoted by Barry Stocker - Derrida on Deconstruction
     A reaction: This idea is said to be the essential thought of Derrida's Deconstruction. The aim is liberation of thought, by identifying and bypassing these tacit metaphysical schemas.
Thought depends on speech [Davidson]
     Full Idea: The thesis I want to refine and then argue for is that thought depends on speech.
     From: Donald Davidson (Thought and Talk [1975], p.8)
     A reaction: This has the instant and rather implausible implication that animals don't think. He is not, of course, saying that all thought is speech, which would leave out thinking in images. You can't do much proper thought without concepts and propositions.
The goal of thought is to understand the world, not instantly sort it into conceptual categories [Fodor]
     Full Idea: The question whether there are recognitional concepts is really the question what thought is for - for directing action, or for discerning truth. And Descartes was right on this: the goal of thought is to understand the world, not to sort it.
     From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 4)
Associative thinking avoids syntax, but can't preserve sense, reference or truth [Fodor]
     Full Idea: The virtue of associative theories of thinking is that they don't require thoughts to have syntactic structure. But they can't be right, since association doesn't preserve either sense or reference (to say nothing of truth).
     From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.3 n28)
     A reaction: This is using the empiricist idea that knowledge is built from mechanical associations to give a complete account of what thinking is. Fodor resolutely opposes it.
Connectionism gives no account of how constituents make complex concepts [Fodor]
     Full Idea: Connectionist architectures provide no counterpart to the relation between a complex concept and its constituents.
     From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.3 n29)
     A reaction: This is the compositionality of thought, upon which Fodor is so insistent. Not that a theory of how the mind is built up from the body is quite likely to give you a theory about what thinking is. I try to keep them separate, which may be wrong.
We may be able to explain rationality mechanically [Fodor]
     Full Idea: We are on the verge of solving a great mystery about the mind: how is rationality mechanically possible?
     From: Jerry A. Fodor (Psychosemantics [1987], p. 20)
     A reaction: Optimistic, given that AI has struggled to implement natural languages, mainly because common sense knowledge seems too complex to encode. Can a machine determine logical forms of sentences?
Thinking about a thing doesn't require activating it [Papineau]
     Full Idea: Thinking about something doesn't require activating some version of it.
     From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], Intro §5)
     A reaction: E.g. I can discuss 'red' without visualising it. This observation strikes me as simple and basic to what thinking is. Papineau thinks that confusion about this simple point leads to major errors in the philosophy of mind.
Consciousness affects bodily movement, so thoughts must be material states [Papineau]
     Full Idea: Conscious states clearly affect our bodily movements. But surely anything that so produces a material effect must itself be a material state.
     From: David Papineau (Thinking about Consciousness [2002], Intro §6)
     A reaction: This is Papineau's simplest possible statement of what he calls the Causal Argument, which he considers to be a knock-down argument for materialism. I agree, but it is really only an intuition. You never know...
Is mental imagery pictorial, or is it propositional? [Heil]
     Full Idea: A fierce debate has raged between proponents of 'pictorial' conceptions of imagery (Kosslyn) and those who take imagery to be propositional (Pylyshyn).
     From: John Heil (Philosophy of Mind [1998], Ch.6)
     A reaction: This may not be a simple dilemma. Pure pictorial imagery seem possible (abstract patterns) and pure propositions are okay (maths), but in most thought they are inextricable. The image is the proposition (a nuclear cloud).
You can think of tomatoes without grasping what they are [Heil]
     Full Idea: You can entertain thoughts of things like tomatoes without a grasp of what they are.
     From: John Heil (The Universe as We Find It [2012], 08.10)
     A reaction: Lowe seemed to think that you had to grasp the generic essence of a tomato before you could think about it, but I agree entirely with Heil.
Some behaviourists believe thought is just suppressed speech [Lowe]
     Full Idea: Some behaviourists have held the view that thinking just is, in effect, suppressed speech.
     From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 7)
     A reaction: He cites J.B.Watson. This would imply that infants and animals can't think. Introspecting my own case, I don't believe it. When I am navigating through a town, for example, I directly relate to my mental map; I see little sign of anything verbal.
Should we take the 'depictivist' or the 'descriptivist/propositionalist' view of mental imagery? [Hanna]
     Full Idea: In the debate in cognitive science on the nature of mental imagery, there is a 'depictivist' side (Johnson-Laird, Kosslyn, Shepard - good images are isomorphic), and a 'descriptivist' or 'propositionalist' side (Pylyshyn and others).
     From: Robert Hanna (Rationality and Logic [2006], 6.6)
     A reaction: Hanna votes firmly in favour of the first view, and implies that they have more or less won the debate.
A thought can refer to many things, but only predicate a universal and affirm a state of affairs [Hossack]
     Full Idea: A thought can refer to a particular or a universal or a state of affairs, but it can predicate only a universal and it can affirm only a state of affairs.
     From: Keith Hossack (Plurals and Complexes [2000], 1)
     A reaction: Hossack is summarising Armstrong's view, which he is accepting. To me, 'thought' must allow for animals, unlike language. I think Hossack's picture is much too clear-cut. Do animals grasp universals? Doubtful. Can they predicate? Yes.
We can identify a set of cognitive capacities which are 'higher order' [Machery]
     Full Idea: Categorization, deduction, induction, analogy-making, linguistic understanding, and planning - all of these are higher cognitive capacities.
     From: Edouard Machery (Doing Without Concepts [2009], 1.1)
     A reaction: His 'lower' competences are perceptual and motor. I say the entry to the higher competences are abstraction, idealisation and generalisation. If you can't do these (chimpanzees!) you will not be admitted.