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Cognitive process independent of the senses

In their most common sense, the terms thought and thinking refer to conscious cognitive processes that can happen independently of sensory stimulation. Their most paradigmatic forms are judging, reasoning, concept formation, problem solving, and deliberation. But other mental processes, like considering an idea, memory, or imagination, are also often included. These processes can happen internally independent of the sensory organs, unlike perception. But when understood in the widest sense, any mental event may be understood as a form of thinking, including perception and unconscious mental processes. In a slightly different sense, the term thought refers not to the mental processes themselves but to mental states or systems of ideas brought about by these processes. Various theories of thinking have been proposed, some of which aim to capture the characteristic features of thought. Platonists hold that thinking consists in discerning and inspecting Platonic forms and their interrelations. It involves the ability to discriminate between the pure Platonic forms themselves and the mere imitations found in the sensory world. According to Aristotelianism, to think about something is to instantiate in one's mind the universal essence of the object of thought. These universals are abstracted from sense experience and are not understood as existing in a changeless intelligible world, in contrast to Platonism. Conceptualism is closely related to Aristotelianism: it identifies thinking with mentally evoking concepts instead of instantiating essences. Inner speech theories claim that thinking is a form of inner speech in which words are silently expressed in the thinker's mind. According to some accounts, this happens in a regular language, like English or French. The language of thought hypothesis, on the other hand, holds that this happens in the medium of a unique mental language called Mentalese. Central to this idea is that linguistic representational systems are built up from atomic and compound representations and that this structure is also found in thought. Associationists understand thinking as the succession of ideas or images. They are particularly interested in the laws of association that govern how the train of thought unfolds. Behaviorists, by contrast, identify thinking with behavioral dispositions to engage in public intelligent behavior as a reaction to particular external stimuli. Computationalism is the most recent of these theories. It sees thinking in analogy to how computers work in terms of the storage, transmission, and processing of information. Various types of thinking are discussed in the academic literature. A judgment is a mental operation in which a proposition is evoked and then either affirmed or denied. Reasoning, on the other hand, is the process of drawing conclusions from premises or evidence. Both judging and reasoning depend on the possession of the relevant concepts, which are acquired in the process of concept formation. In the case of problem solving, thinking aims at reaching a predefined goal by overcoming certain obstacles. Deliberation is an important form of practical thought that consists in formulating possible courses of action and assessing the reasons for and against them. This may lead to a decision by choosing the most favorable option. Both episodic memory and imagination present objects and situations internally, in an attempt to accurately reproduce what was previously experienced or as a free rearrangement, respectively. Unconscious thought is thought that happens without being directly experienced. It is sometimes posited to explain how difficult problems are solved in cases where no conscious thought was employed. Thought is discussed in various academic disciplines. Phenomenology is interested in the experience of thinking. An important question in this field concerns the experiential character of thinking and to what extent this character can be explained in terms of sensory experience. Metaphysics is, among other things, interested in the relation between mind and matter. This concerns the question of how thinking can fit into the material world as described by the natural sciences. Cognitive psychology aims to understand thought as a form of information processing. Developmental psychology, on the other hand, investigates the development of thought from birth to maturity and asks which factors this development depends on. Psychoanalysis emphasizes the role of the unconscious in mental life. Other fields concerned with thought include linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, biology, and sociology. Various concepts and theories are closely related to the topic of thought. The term "law of thought" refers to three fundamental laws of logic: the law of contradiction, the law of excluded middle, and the principle of identity. Counterfactual thinking involves mental representations of non actual situations and events in which the thinker tries to assess what would be the case if things had been different. Thought experiments often employ counterfactual thinking in order to illustrate theories or to test their plausibility. Critical thinking is a form of thinking that is reasonable, reflective, and focused on determining what to believe or how to act. Positive thinking involves focusing one's attention on the positive aspects of one's situation and is intimately related to optimism.

The terms "thought" and "thinking" refer to a wide variety of psychological activities. In their most common sense, they are understood as conscious processes that can happen independently of sensory stimulation. In a more restricted sense, only the most paradigmatic cases are considered thought. These involve conscious processes that are conceptual or linguistic and sufficiently abstract, like judging, inferring, problem solving, and deliberating. Sometimes the terms "thought" and "thinking" are understood in a very wide sense as referring to any form of mental process, conscious or unconscious. A contrast sometimes found in the academic literature is that between thinking and feeling. In this context, thinking is associated with a sober, dispassionate, and rational approach to its topic while feeling involves a direct emotional engagement. The terms "thought" and "thinking" can also be used to refer not to the mental processes themselves but to mental states or systems of ideas brought about by these processes. In this sense, they are often synonymous with the term "belief" and its cognates and may refer to the mental states which either belong to an individual or are common among a certain group of people. Discussions of thought in the academic literature often leave it implicit which sense of the term they have in mind. The word thought comes from Old English þoht, or geþoht, from the stem of þencan "to conceive of in the mind, consider".

Various theories of thinking have been proposed. On this view, the difficulty of thinking consists in being unable to grasp the Platonic forms and to distinguish them as the original from the mere imitations found in the sensory world. This means, for example, distinguishing beauty itself from derivative images of beauty. But this explanation depends on various assumptions usually not accepted in contemporary thought. This explanation avoids various of the objections raised against Platonism. Conceptualism is closely related to Aristotelianism. It states that thinking consists in mentally evoking concepts. Some of these concepts may be innate, but most have to be learned through abstraction from sense experience before they can be used in thought. Three central aspects are often ascribed to inner speech: it is in an important sense similar to hearing sounds, it involves the use of language and it constitutes a motor plan that could be used for actual speech. Inner speech theory has a strong initial plausibility since introspection suggests that indeed many thoughts are accompanied by inner speech. But its opponents usually contend that this is not true for all types of thinking. It has been argued, for example, that forms of daydreaming constitute non linguistic thought. This issue is relevant to the question of whether animals have the capacity to think. If thinking is necessarily tied to language then this would suggest that there is an important gap between humans and animals since only humans have a sufficiently complex language. But the existence of non linguistic thoughts suggests that this gap may not be that big and that some animals do indeed think.

There are various theories about the relation between language and thought. One prominent version in contemporary philosophy is called the language of thought hypothesis. It states that thinking happens in the medium of a mental language. This language, often referred to as Mentalese, is similar to regular languages in various respects: it is composed of words that are connected to each other in syntactic ways to form sentences. Apart from this abstract characterization, no further concrete claims are made about how human thought is implemented by the brain or which other similarities to natural language it has. This succession is seen as being governed by laws of association, which determine how the train of thought unfolds. But such an association does not guarantee that the connection is meaningful or rational. For example, because of the association between the terms "cold" and "Idaho", the thought "this coffee shop is cold" might lead to the thought "Russia should annex Idaho". On this view, having a particular thought is the same as having a disposition to behave in a certain way. This view is often motivated by empirical considerations: it is very difficult to study thinking as a private mental process but it is much easier to study how organisms react to a certain situation with a given behavior. The term "behaviorism" is also sometimes used in a slightly different sense when applied to thinking to refer to a specific form of inner speech theory. This view focuses on the idea that the relevant inner speech is a derivative form of regular outward speech. This problem consists in the fact that individual thoughts or mental states usually do not correspond to one particular behavior. So thinking that the pie is tasty does not automatically lead to eating the pie, since various other mental states may still inhibit this behavior, for example, the belief that it would be impolite to do so or that the pie is poisoned.

Computationalist theories of thinking, often found in the cognitive sciences, understand thinking as a form of information processing. But while this analogy has some intuitive attraction, theorists have struggled to give a more explicit explanation of what computation is. A further problem consists in explaining the sense in which thinking is a form of computing. The traditionally dominant view defines computation in terms of Turing machines, though contemporary accounts often focus on neural networks for their analogies. Thought may be seen as a form of program that can be executed in the same way by many different systems, including humans, animals, and even robots. According to one such view, whether something is a thought only depends on its role "in producing further internal states and verbal outputs". but there is no universally accepted taxonomy summarizing all these types.

Thinking is often identified with the act of judging. A judgment is a mental operation in which a proposition is evoked and then either affirmed or denied. It involves deciding what to believe and aims at determining whether the judged proposition is true or false. Various theories of judgment have been proposed. The traditionally dominant approach is the combination theory. It states that judgments consist in the combination of concepts. On this view, to judge that "all men are mortal" is to combine the concepts "man" and "mortal". The same concepts can be combined in different ways, corresponding to different forms of judgment, for example, as "some men are mortal" or "no man is mortal". Other theories of judgment focus more on the relation between the judged proposition and reality. According to Franz Brentano, a judgment is either a belief or a disbelief in the existence of some entity. In this sense, there are only two fundamental forms of judgment: "A exists" and "A does not exist". When applied to the sentence "all men are mortal", the entity in question is "immortal men", of whom it is said that they do not exist. For example, given the premises "all men are mortal" and "Socrates is a man", it follows deductively that "Socrates is mortal". Non deductive reasoning, also referred to as defeasible reasoning or non monotonic reasoning, is still rationally compelling but the truth of the conclusion is not ensured by the truth of the premises. Induction is one form of non deductive reasoning, for example, when one concludes that "the sun will rise tomorrow" based on one's experiences of all the previous days. Other forms of non deductive reasoning include the inference to the best explanation and analogical reasoning. Fallacies are faulty forms of thinking that go against the norms of correct reasoning. Formal fallacies concern faulty inferences found in deductive reasoning. Denying the antecedent is one type of formal fallacy, for example, "If Othello is a bachelor, then he is male. Othello is not a bachelor. Therefore, Othello is not male". Informal fallacies, on the other hand, apply to all types of reasoning. The source of their flaw is to be found in the content or the context of the argument. This is often caused by ambiguous or vague expressions in natural language, as in "Feathers are light. What is light cannot be dark. Therefore, feathers cannot be dark". An important aspect of fallacies is that they seem to be rationally compelling on the first look and thereby seduce people into accepting and committing them. They are rules that govern how objects are sorted into different classes. For example, the proposition "wombats are animals" involves the concepts "wombat" and "animal". Someone who does not possess the concept "wombat" may still be able to read the sentence but cannot entertain the corresponding proposition. Concept formation is a form of thinking in which new concepts are acquired. It involves becoming familiar with the characteristic features shared by all instances of the corresponding type of entity and developing the ability to identify positive and negative cases. This process usually corresponds to learning the meaning of the word associated with the type in question. According to one popular view, concepts are to be understood in terms of abilities. On this view, two central aspects characterize concept possession: the ability to discriminate between positive and negative cases and the ability to draw inferences from this concept to related concepts. Concept formation corresponds to acquiring these abilities.

In the case of problem solving, thinking aims at reaching a predefined goal by overcoming certain obstacles. Some researchers identify various steps in the process of problem solving. These steps include recognizing the problem, trying to understand its nature, identifying general criteria the solution should meet, deciding how these criteria should be prioritized, monitoring the progress, and evaluating the results. Another way to categorize different forms of problem solving is by distinguishing between algorithms and heuristics. This involves foresight to anticipate what might happen. Based on this foresight, different courses of action can be formulated in order to influence what will happen. Decisions are an important part of deliberation. They are about comparing alternative courses of action and choosing the most favorable one. It is based on the idea that they should always choose the alternative with the highest expected value. Each alternative can lead to various possible outcomes, each of which has a different value. The expected value of an alternative consists in the sum of the values of each outcome associated with it multiplied by the probability that this outcome occurs. It is a form of mental time travel in which the past experience is re experienced. But this does not constitute an exact copy of the original experience since the episodic memory involves additional aspects and information not present in the original experience. This includes both a feeling of familiarity and chronological information about the past event in relation to the present. Because of this missing link to actuality, more freedom is involved in most forms of imagination: its contents can be freely varied, changed, and recombined to create new arrangements never experienced before. But they are still closer to sensation than more abstract forms of thought since they present sensory contents that could, at least in principle, also be perceived.

Conscious thought is the paradigmatic form of thinking and is often the focus of the corresponding research. But it has been argued that some forms of thought also happen on the unconscious level. Other suggestions for the difference between the two forms of thinking include that conscious thought tends to follow formal logical laws while unconscious thought relies more on associative processing and that only conscious thinking is conceptually articulated and happens through the medium of language.

Phenomenology is the science of the structure and contents of experience. The term "cognitive phenomenology" refers to the experiential character of thinking or what it feels like to think. Some theorists claim that there is no distinctive cognitive phenomenology. On such a view, the experience of thinking is just one form of sensory experience. An often cited thought experiment in favor of the existence of a distinctive cognitive phenomenology involves two persons listening to a radio broadcast in French, one who understands French and the other who does not. The idea behind this example is that both listeners hear the same sounds and therefore have the same non cognitive experience. In order to explain the difference, a distinctive cognitive phenomenology has to be posited: only the experience of the first person has this additional cognitive character since it is accompanied by a thought that corresponds to the meaning of what is said. Other arguments for the experience of thinking focus on the direct introspective access to thinking or on the thinker's knowledge of their own thoughts. It involves epistemic agency, in which a proposition is entertained, evidence for and against it is considered, and, based on this reasoning, the proposition is either affirmed or rejected. On such a view, various aspects of perceptual experience resemble judgments without being judgments in the strict sense. In this context, "intention" means that some kind of object is experienced. In intuitive intentions, the object is presented through sensory contents. Empty intentions, on the other hand, present their object in a more abstract manner without the help of sensory contents. The main aim of philosophers working in this area is to determine the nature of the mind and mental states/processes, and how—or even if—minds are affected by and can affect the body. Human perceptual experiences depend on stimuli which arrive at one's various sensory organs from the external world and these stimuli cause changes in one's mental state, ultimately causing one to feel a sensation, which may be pleasant or unpleasant. Someone's desire for a slice of pizza, for example, will tend to cause that person to move his or her body in a specific manner and in a specific direction to obtain what he or she wants. The question, then, is how it can be possible for conscious experiences to arise out of a lump of gray matter endowed with nothing but electrochemical properties. A related problem is to explain how someone's propositional attitudes (e. g. beliefs and desires) can cause that individual's neurons to fire and his muscles to contract in exactly the correct manner. These comprise some of the puzzles that have confronted epistemologists and philosophers of mind from at least the time of René Descartes. The above reflects a classical, functional description of how we work as cognitive, thinking systems. However the apparently irresolvable mind–body problem is said to be overcome, and bypassed, by the embodied cognition approach, with its roots in the work of Heidegger, Piaget, Vygotsky, Merleau Ponty and the pragmatist John Dewey. This approach states that the classical approach of separating the mind and analysing its processes is misguided: instead, we should see that the mind, actions of an embodied agent, and the environment it perceives and envisions, are all parts of a whole which determine each other. Therefore, functional analysis of the mind alone will always leave us with the mind–body problem which cannot be solved.

Psychologists have concentrated on thinking as an intellectual exertion aimed at finding an answer to a question or the solution of a practical problem. Cognitive psychology is a branch of psychology that investigates internal mental processes such as problem solving, memory, and language; all of which are used in thinking. The school of thought arising from this approach is known as cognitivism, which is interested in how people mentally represent information processing. It had its foundations in the Gestalt psychology of Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka, and in the work of Jean Piaget, who provided a theory of stages/phases that describes children's cognitive development. Cognitive psychologists use psychophysical and experimental approaches to understand, diagnose, and solve problems, concerning themselves with the mental processes which mediate between stimulus and response. They study various aspects of thinking, including the psychology of reasoning, and how people make decisions and choices, solve problems, as well as engage in creative discovery and imaginative thought. Cognitive theory contends that solutions to problems either take the form of algorithms: rules that are not necessarily understood but promise a solution, or of heuristics: rules that are understood but that do not always guarantee solutions. Cognitive science differs from cognitive psychology in that algorithms that are intended to simulate human behavior are implemented or implementable on a computer. In other instances, solutions may be found through insight, a sudden awareness of relationships. In developmental psychology, Jean Piaget was a pioneer in the study of the development of thought from birth to maturity. In his theory of cognitive development, thought is based on actions on the environment. That is, Piaget suggests that the environment is understood through assimilations of objects in the available schemes of action and these accommodate to the objects to the extent that the available schemes fall short of the demands. As a result of this interplay between assimilation and accommodation, thought develops through a sequence of stages that differ qualitatively from each other in mode of representation and complexity of inference and understanding. That is, thought evolves from being based on perceptions and actions at the sensorimotor stage in the first two years of life to internal representations in early childhood. Subsequently, representations are gradually organized into logical structures which first operate on the concrete properties of the reality, in the stage of concrete operations, and then operate on abstract principles that organize concrete properties, in the stage of formal operations. In recent years, the Piagetian conception of thought was integrated with information processing conceptions. Thus, thought is considered as the result of mechanisms that are responsible for the representation and processing of information. In this conception, speed of processing, cognitive control, and working memory are the main functions underlying thought. In the neo Piagetian theories of cognitive development, the development of thought is considered to come from increasing speed of processing, enhanced cognitive control, and increasing working memory. Positive psychology emphasizes the positive aspects of human psychology as equally important as the focus on mood disorders and other negative symptoms. In Character Strengths and Virtues, Peterson and Seligman list a series of positive characteristics. One person is not expected to have every strength, nor are they meant to fully capsulate that characteristic entirely. The list encourages positive thought that builds on a person's strengths, rather than how to "fix" their "symptoms".

The "id", "ego" and "super ego" are the three parts of the "psychic apparatus" defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche; they are the three theoretical constructs in terms of whose activity and interaction mental life is described. According to this model, the uncoordinated instinctual trends are encompassed by the "id", the organized realistic part of the psyche is the "ego", and the critical, moralizing function is the "super ego". For psychoanalysis, the unconscious does not include all that is not conscious, rather only what is actively repressed from conscious thought or what the person is averse to knowing consciously. In a sense this view places the self in relationship to their unconscious as an adversary, warring with itself to keep what is unconscious hidden. If a person feels pain, all he can think of is alleviating the pain. Any of his desires, to get rid of pain or enjoy something, command the mind what to do. For Freud, the unconscious was a repository for socially unacceptable ideas, wishes or desires, traumatic memories, and painful emotions put out of mind by the mechanism of psychological repression. However, the contents did not necessarily have to be solely negative. In the psychoanalytic view, the unconscious is a force that can only be recognized by its effects—it expresses itself in the symptom. The collective unconscious, sometimes known as collective subconscious, is a term of analytical psychology, coined by Carl Jung. It is a part of the unconscious mind, shared by a society, a people, or all humanity, in an interconnected system that is the product of all common experiences and contains such concepts as science, religion, and morality. While Freud did not distinguish between "individual psychology" and "collective psychology", Jung distinguished the collective unconscious from the personal subconscious particular to each human being. The collective unconscious is also known as "a reservoir of the experiences of our species". In the "Definitions" chapter of Jung's seminal work Psychological Types, under the definition of "collective" Jung references representations collectives, a term coined by Lucien Lévy Bruhl in his 1910 book How Natives Think. Jung says this is what he describes as the collective unconscious. Freud, on the other hand, did not accept the idea of a collective unconscious.

Traditionally, the term "laws of thought" refers to three fundamental laws of logic: the law of contradiction, the law of excluded middle, and the principle of identity. Some formulations of the laws of thought include a fourth law: the principle of sufficient reason.

Counterfactual thinking involves mental representations of non actual situations and events, i. e. of what is "contrary to the facts". It is usually conditional: it aims at assessing what would be the case if a certain condition had obtained. This is the case, for example, when one tries to anticipate what might happen in the future if an uncertain event occurs and this event actually occurs later and brings with it the anticipated consequences. In this wider sense, the term "subjunctive conditional" is sometimes used instead of "counterfactual conditional". They are experiments in the sense that a certain situation is set up and one tries to learn from this situation by understanding what follows from it. The Chinese room argument is a famous thought experiment proposed by John Searle. Thought experiments are employed for various purposes, for example, for entertainment, education, or as arguments for or against theories. Most discussions focus on their use as arguments. This use is found in fields like philosophy, the natural sciences, and history. It holds itself to various standards, like clarity and rationality. In this sense, it involves not just cognitive processes trying to solve the issue at hand but at the same time meta cognitive processes ensuring that it lives up to its own standards. But not all forms of cognitively valuable processes involve critical thinking. Arriving at the correct solution to a problem by blindly following the steps of an algorithm does not qualify as critical thinking. The same is true if the solution is presented to the thinker in a sudden flash of insight and accepted straight away. In this sense, it is important to convey not just a set of true beliefs to the student but also the ability to draw one's own conclusions and to question pre existing beliefs. Other objections are based on the idea that critical thinking and the attitude underlying it involve various unjustified biases, like egocentrism, distanced objectivity, indifference, and an overemphasis of the theoretical in contrast to the practical. This is usually seen as a global outlook that applies especially to thinking but includes other mental processes, like feeling, as well. Pessimism, on the other hand, may have positive effects since it can mitigate disappointments by anticipating failures. Positive thinking is a recurrent topic in the self help literature. Here, often the claim is made that one can significantly improve one's life by trying to think positively, even if this means fostering beliefs that are contrary to evidence. In the New Thought movement, positive thinking figures in the law of attraction, the pseudoscientific claim that positive thoughts can directly influence the external world by attracting positive outcomes.