Thinking. In its diverse forms--as reasoning, believing, reflecting, calculating, deliberating.
Thinking appears to enjoy an intimate connection with speech, but just what that connection might be is difficult to establish. It is seldom, as Plato would have it, a matter of an inward dialogue carried on by the mind with itself. Not only is wordless thought possible, as when we think how a room would look with the furniture rearranged; it does not even require attention to the matter in question for us to have thought that something was so, as when, tripping on a stair, we say we thought there was one fewer stair than there in fact was.
Is thinking that p a matter of being disposed to say that p? This is tempting through making reliance on the spoken word basic, but it does not get us far as it stands. First, while thinking that p we need have no inclination whatsoever to say that p; at best, the disposition must be restricted by an appropriate condition, as 'if asked to give our opinion'. Even then there is a supposition that we are speaking truthfully, and this would seem to be a matter of saying what we really think. A more satisfactory characterization might run: to think that p is to be in a state of mind expressible by saying that p with an intention to speak the truth. The latter condition is not 'intending to speak truthfully', which would again reintroduce thinking, but 'intending to say something that is in fact true'.
This characterization allows for a suitably loose connection between thought and speech in several respects: those who cannot in fact speak are not being denied the capacity to think, and indeed it is possible that someone should suggest a form of words which better expresses another's thought than the words originally used. It is also allowed that there should be a range of quite different propositions to which one might assent as expressing one's thought. You ask whether I thought the window was dirty. Yes indeed, I reply, but I could also have agreed if you had asked whether I thought there was a smudge on the window-pane, this being equally adequate to conveying how things struck me at the time. It is not as if the formulation ventured has to match unspoken words. I did not think in words. On the other hand, the characterization is also congenial to the idea that there are limits to the range of thoughts possible without language. Lacking the relevant vocabulary, a person could hardly be in a state of mind expressible by saying, with the relevant intention, that Sofia is the capital of Bulgaria.
Can animals think? We might say of a monkey which takes refuge from a snake by going up a tree that it knows that it is safe there. We might say this, because the monkey no longer behaves as if in imminent danger, but observes the snake in a detached fashion. However, while we may be prepared to say that it knows, we may be less happy to say that the monkey thinks that it is safe. That threatens to demand more of the monkey's mental capacities than we are wining to concede. On the other hand, we need a description for the case where there would be knowledge that p but for the fact that p is false, and while 'thinks that p' has the disadvantage of suggesting a mastery of concepts, an inner mental response, which it would be fanciful to attribute to the animal, so long as 'knows that p' can be affirmed solely on the strength of observed behaviour, the same status can be extended to the ascription of thought.
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