Thinking and Reasoning
The Elements Of Cognition
Thinking is the mental manipulation of information. Our mental representations simplify and summarize information from the environment.
Concept is a mental category that groups objects, relations, activities, abstractions, or qualities that share certain properties.
Basic concepts have a moderate number of instances and are easier to acquire than concepts with few or many instances.
Prototypical instances of a concept are more representative than others.
Propositions are made up of concepts and express a unitary idea. They may be linked together to form cognitive schemas, which serve as mental models of aspects of the world.
Mental images also play a role in thinking.
How Conscious Is Thought?
Not all mental processing is conscious.
Subconscious processes lie outside of awareness but can be brought into consciousness when necessary.
Reasoning And Creativity
Reasoning is purposeful mental activity that involves drawing inference and conclusions from observations, facts, or assumptions.
Formal reasoning problems can often be solved by applying an algorithm, a set of procedures guaranteed to produce a solution, or by using logical processes, such as deductive and inductive reasoning.
In deductive reasoning if the premises are true then the conclusion must be true.
In inductive reasoning, the premises provide support for a conclusion, but the conclusion could still be false.
Science depends heavily on inductive reasoning.
In informal reasoning problems, there may be no clearly correct solution.
Disagreement may exist about basic premises, information may be incomplete, and many viewpoints may compete.
Such problems may call for the application of heuristics.
Heuristics are rules of thumb that suggest a course of action without guaranteeing an optimal solution.
Problems may also require dialectical reasoning about opposing points of view.
Dialectical reasoning a process in which opposing facts or ideas are weighed and compared, with a view to determining the best solution or to resolving differences.
Creative problem solving requires us to overcome mental sets and to exercise divergent as well as convergent thinking.
Mental set is a tendency to solve problems using procedures that worked before on similar problems.
Divergent thinking is mental exploration of unconventional alternatives in solving problems; By breaking mental sets, it tends to enhance creativity.
Convergent thinking is thinking aimed at finding a single correct answer to a problem.
Traditional creativity tests measure fluency, flexibility, and originality in generating solutions to problems.
Creativity tends to flourish when people have:
Control over how to perform a task or solve a problem.
Are evaluated unobtrusively, instead of being constantly observed and judged.
Are given the freedom to work independently.
The Development Of Thought And Reasoning
Piaget proposed four stages of cognitive development:
Sensorimotor when the child learns object permanence.
Preoperational during which language and symbolic thought develop, although the child remains egocentric in reasoning.
Concrete operations is when the child comes to understand conservation and identity.
Formal operations during which abstract reasoning develops.
Researchers have found that the changes from one stage to another are not as clear-cut as Piaget implied.
Young children have more cognitive abilities at earlier ages than Piaget thought.
Young children are not always egocentric in their thinking.
Studies of reflective judgment (critical thinking) show that many people have trouble thinking dialectically.
People in the prereflective stages assume that a correct answer always exists; they do not distinguish between knowledge and belief, or between belief and evidence.
Those in the quasi-reflective stages think that because knowledge is sometimes uncertain, any judgment about the evidence is purely subjective.
Those who think reflectively understand that although some things cannot be known with certainty, some judgments are more valid than others depending on their coherence, usefulness, fit with the evidence, and so on.
Higher education moves people gradually closer to reflective judgment.
Barriers To Reasoning Rationally
The need to be right can be an obstacle to rational thinking, as can mental laziness, which many commentators think has increased because television watching has replaced reading.
Thinking is the mental manipulation of information. Our mental representations simplify and summarize information from the environment.