PSYchology

Thinking is a cognitive process.

“Our knowledge of objective reality begins with sensation and perception. Sensation is the source, and, moreover, the only source, of our knowledge of reality. But, starting with sensations and perception, knowledge of reality does not end with them. From sensation and perception it passes to thinking.

Sensations and perceptions reflect individual aspects of phenomena, moments of reality in more or less random combinations. Thinking correlates the data of sensations and perceptions — compares, compares, distinguishes, reveals relations, mediations, and through the relations between directly sensually given properties of things and phenomena reveals new abstract properties that are not directly sensually given; revealing the interrelationships and comprehending reality in its interrelationships, thinking more deeply cognizes its essence.

Thinking reflects being in its connections and relationships, in its diverse mediations” (S.L.u.e.shtein, Fundamentals of General Psychology, p. 283).

In pathopsychology and neuropsychology, thinking is referred to as one of the HMFs. It is considered as an activity that has a motive, a goal, a system of actions and operations, a result and control.

Typology of thinking

In various concepts and branches of psychology, thinking is found in various phrases:

  • Visual Action Thinking
  • Visual and imaginative thinking
  • Conceptual thinking (verbal-logical)
  • intuitive thinking
  • theoretical thinking
  • groupthink
  • visual thinking
  • Quantitative Thinking
  • Abstract thinking
  • Concrete thinking
  • Speech thinking
  • Emotional thinking
  • Logical thinking
  • Algorithmic thinking
  • Alternative thinking
  • Practical thinking

History of the study of thinking in psychology

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Würzburg school of psychology (O. Külpe and others) put thinking at the center of its interests, the works of whose representatives were based on Husserl’s phenomenology and the rejection of associationism. In the experiments of this school, thinking was studied by methods of systematic introspection with the aim of decomposing the process into basic stages.

The main stages of thinking

Using the self-observation data of famous scientists (such as G. Helmholtz and A. Poincaré), four «stages of creative thinking» were distinguished: preparation, maturation, inspiration, and verification of truth. Currently, there are many different classifications of the sequence of the act of thinking.

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