Thought: Essence, Levels and Forms

Transition from sensation to thought. Only a small part of what man cognizes can be covered by sensuous contemplation. Mostly, cognition is realized in thought in terms of concepts, judgements, etc. Man cannot live without thinking. So how is the transition from the sensuous to the conceptual level of cognition to be explained? How is a sensuous image of an object transformed into an act of thought. In actual fact the two cognitive levels are inseparable, and an entirely independent sensuous cognition does not therefore exist. Man looks at the world with understanding eyes. When we speak of the acuteness of perception, we have in mind the clarity of the ob­ject's conscious perception. Man's cognitive activity is made possible precisely by this unity, by the admixture, so to speak, of thought in sensuous contemplation.

Thought correlates the evidence of the sense organs with the individual's available knowledge and, more­over, with mankind's entire total experience and knowledge to the extent that these are possessed by the given subject. The transition from the sensuous to the rational does not mean, however, the movement from reality to the empty darkness of the supersensuous. Thought relies on the sensuous material of speech, in the first place of inner speech, and on the symbolized visual images.

The specifics of thought. Thought is the highest form of rational cognitive activity. Thought is goal-directed, mediated, abstracted and generalized reflection of the essential properties and relations of things and phenomena realized in terms of concepts, judgements, and the­ories, and also it is a process of creative production of new ideas. The goal-directedness of thought is manifested in its orientation towards cognition of truth through the formulation and solution of some practical or theoretical task. It assumes a wide-ranging intellectual activity oriented towards understanding the essence of a problem, i.e. towards constructing a concept of an object. It is implemented in various forms — concepts, categories, judgements, inferences, hypotheses, and theories which record and generalize mankind's socio-historical experience.

The unity of the sensuous and the rational. Starting with sensa­tions and perceptions, proceeding to representations, and rising to the higher levels of theoretical thinking, cognition emerges as a uni­fied process closely connected with will and emotions.

Stressing the unity of the sensuous and the rational stages of cog­nition, we must bear in mind that they have a relative independence: thought is a qualitatively independent whole with its specific struc­ture different from the structure of sensuous cognition.

The principal forms of thought. A form of thought is a definite type of its organization, a type of connection between the elements of its content. The principal forms in which thought emerged, de­veloped, and is now implemented, are the concept, the judgement and the inference. These forms of thought evolved as a result of thousand-year-long human practice of transformation of reality, as the quintessence of this practice, a quintessence that embodies the forms of men's activity in the intellectual sphere.

- The concept is a form of thought which reflects the essential properties, connections and relations between objects and phenome­na in (heir contradictions and development; a thought-concept gener­alizes and singles out the objects of a certain class in terms of defi­nite generic and specific features inherent in them. Concepts are ob­jective in their content and universal in logical form, as they per­tain to the general rather than the individual

Concepts may be scientific and everyday ones. The latter identify similar properties of objects and phenomena, often on the basis of external traits, regardless of the laws controlling them, and fix these properties by naming them. The former reveal the profound proper­ties, or the general as the essential and the law-governed.

Concepts are both the result and the means of cognitive activity. It is due to concepts that thinking can be theoretical as well as practical, since only in concepts is the essence of things reflected. Abstract thinking itself is regarded as a process of operating with concepts.

Concepts acquire logical meaning only in judgements. The judgement is a form of thought in which something is asserted or refuted through establishing links between concepts.

Logical operations are ways of establishing necessary connections and relations between thoughts which ensure the cognitive movement of thought from ignorance to knowledge. Thought is impossible without judgements, and judgements are im­possible without concepts.

Man can arrive at a given judgement through direct observation of some fact or in a mediated way—with the aid of inference. An in-ference-is a process of reasoning in the course of which one or several judgements called premisses yield a new judgement (conclusion or consequence) which follows logically from the premisses.

Judgements and inferences are operations of thought which man performs all the time: they permeate the entire fabric of mental ac­tivity. Let us consider two principal forms of syllogistic activity—in­duction and deduction, the two most important devices or methods of cognitive activity. As an operation of thought, induction is a pro­cess of derivation of a general proposition from a number of particular (less general) statements or individual facts, while deduction is on the contrary a process of reasoning proceeding from the general to the particular or less general. Two principal types of induction are distin­guished—complete induction and incomplete induction.

Complete induction is a general proposition concerning all the objects of a certain set or class on the basis of considering each ele­ment of this set. The sphere of application of such induction is clearly restricted to the objects whose number is limited and practi­cally accessible to direct observation.

In practice, forms of incomplete induction are mostly used, which assume a conclusion about a certain class of objects on the basis of cognition of only a part of the objects of the given class. Incomplete induction, based on experimental research and comprizing theoreti­cal thinking (including deduction) can yield reliable conclusions (or conclusions approximating to reliable ones). Such incomplete in­duction is called scientific induction.

On the logical quality of thought: dialectical and formal logic. Our consideration of the forms of thought was at the same time a discus­sion of its logical quality. What is the essence of the logical quality of thought, in its most general form? In brief, it is this: the content of thought must acquire an adequate form, and in unity with this form it must agree with the essence of the domain of the discourse, with the character of things and their connections.

We call logical those thoughts which are marked by strict organization of their semantic structure.

The only means of discovering alogisms in thought _;is concrete dia­lectical analysis of reality reflected in the utterance. ^:Logical thought grasps the necessary, essential links between objects and phenome­na, which makes it possible to deduce the principle of their organiz­ation and functioning.

Logic as a science studies the structure of thought with the aim of achieving true knowledge. That is the principal requirement imposed on fortnal logic, which deals with structures of thought in terms of their form and in abstraction from the concrete content of thought. | As it developed, formal logic considerably enlarged the sphere of its problems and research methods. Nowadays it has such subdivisions as modal, intuitionist, mathematical, symbolic logic, and some others.

Despite the rich arsenal of theoretical tools, formal logic does not cover the entire process of the movement of thought in its dia­lectical opposites and contradictions. This is the subject matter of dialectical logic, which studies the principles and laws of the forma­tion, modification and development of knowledge. The subject mat­ter of dialectical logic is creatively cognizing thought, its questing activity, its development through overcoming constantly emerging contradictions, its logical structure, and correlation of elements — concepts, judgements and theories — determined by their concrete content. The subject matter of dialectical logic also includes the predictive function of thought. It studies the entire system of ca­tegories and their epistemological and logical functions, as well as the specifically epistemological principles and methods, such as analysis and synthesis, generalization and abstraction, ascendance from the sensuous-concrete to the abstract and transition from the abstract to the conceptual-concrete, the relationship between the empirical and the theoretical, etc. Dialectical logic thus coincides in part with epistemology. That is why the question arises of the coin­cidence and unity of logic, epistemology and dialectics.

In the philosophy of Marxism dialectics is regarded both as epistemology and as logic. This follows from the fact that human thought and the objective world are subordinated to identi­cal laws, and their results cannot therefore contradict each other. But the unity of being and thinking, their subordination to identical laws does not mean that this unity is identity. If universal interconnectedness and development of reality exist outside and inde­pendently of human consciousness, semantic connections and the development of cognizing thought, reflecting reality, are subject to epistemological and logical principles.

Assimilating the results of history and epistemology, and relying on a wealth of concrete connections of the world and on mankind's socio-historical practice, dialectical logic represents the highest stage in the development of thought. As such, it posits a series of demands, firstly, if we are to have a true knowledge of an object we must look at and examine all its facets, its connections and 'mediacies'. Secondly, dialectical logic requires that an object should be taken in development, in change, in 'self-movement'. Thirdly, a full 'de- fmition' of an object must include the whole of human experience, both as a criterion of truth and a practical indicator of its connec­tion with human wants. Fourthly, dialectical logic holds that 'truth is always concrete, never abstract'. This description does not of course cover all the content of dialectical logic, yet it stresses its fundamental principles.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 1017