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WHAT IS THINKING?Thinking about actions, beliefs, and personal goals asserts that thinking consists of search and inference. We search for certain objects and then we make inferences from and about them. Let us take a simple example of a decision. Suppose you are a college student trying to decide which courses you will take next term. Most of the courses you have scheduled are required for your major, but you have room for one elective. The question that starts your thinking is simply this: Which course should I take? You begin by saying to a friend, .I have a free course. Any ideas?. She says that she enjoyed Professor Smith.s course in Soviet-American relations. You think that the subject sounds interesting, and you want to know more about modern history. You ask her about the work, and she says that there is a lot of reading and a twenty-page paper. You think about all the computer-science assignments you are going to have this term, and, realizing that you were hoping for an easy course, you resolve to look for something else. After thinking about it yourself, you recall hearing about a course in American history since World War II. That has the same advantages as the first course . it sounds interesting and it is about modern history . but you think the work might not be so hard. You try to find someone who has taken the course. Clearly, we could go on with this imaginary example, but it already shows that main characteristics of thinking. It begins with doubt. It involves a search directed at removing the doubt. Thinking is, in a way, like exploration. In the course of the search, you have discovered two possible courses, some good features of both courses, some bad feature of one course, and some goals you are trying to achieve. You have also made an inference: You rejected the first course because the work was too hard. We search for three kinds of objects: possibilities, evidence, and goals. Possibilities are possible answers to the original question, possible resolutions of the original doubt. (In the example just given, they are two possible courses.) Notice that possibilities can come from inside yourself or from outside. (This is also true of evidence and goals.) The first possibility in this example came from outside: It was suggested by someone else. The second came from inside: It came from your memory. Goals are the criteria by which you evaluate the possibilities. Three goals have been mentioned in our example: your desire for an interesting course; your feeling that you ought to know something about recent history; and your desire to keep your work load manageable. Some goals are usually present at the time when thinking begins. In this case, only the goal of finding a course is present, and it is an insufficient goal, because it does not help you to distinguish among the possibilities, the various courses you could take. Additional goals must be sought. Evidence consists of any belief or potential belief that helps you determine the extent to which a possibility achieves some goal. Such a search for evidence might initiate a whole other episode of thinking, the goal of which would be to determine where that evidence can be found. In addition to these search processes, there is a process of inference, or use of evidence, in which each possibility is strengthened or weakened as a choice on the basis of the evidence, in the light of the goals. The process of thinking the search for possibilities, evidence, and goals and the use of the evidence to evaluate possibilities do not occur in any fixed order. Thinking is, in its most general sense, a method of finding and choosing among the potential possibilities, that is, possible actions, beliefs, or personal goals.
Date: 2015-01-29; view: 1662
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