In the 17th century `thinking' was often used to cover mental phenomena in general, including feeling, with the result that Descartes and others could distinguish between substances according as they had extension or thinking as their main attributes. This usage is no longer current.
Thinking
a) can take the forms of believing, imagining, pondering, calculating,
deliberating, ruminating, assuming, evaluating;
b) something occurring at a given time or a state we can be in;
c) it can concern theoretical or practical matters.
Thinking is not a separate activity. It is therefore sometimes called polymorphous. This suggests an `adverbial' view of thinking, whereby there is no activity (or set of activities) to be called thinking but activities in general can be carried out thoughtfully or thoughtlessly, intelligently or unintelligently etc. This shows that intelligence or thoughtfulness can be manifested in the fact that something is done, as well as in the manner in which it is done.
A recently popular theory is that we have here simply physical events in the brain seen from a certain point of view (identity theory of mind).
Problem of the role of mental images, language and behavior.
Two questions:
a) How is thinking related to time? What is the structure of a thought, if it
has one, related to that of a sentence expressing it?
b) How far can thoughts be described?
The question of the structure of a thought raises the question of how thinking
a whole thought or proposition is related to thinking of an object (which the
thought was about). Another important question about thinking concerns the
things we think about. If I think about Caesar, does this constitute a relation
between me and him?
With the idea that thought requires a representative, compare the
representation theory of perception.
A further question we can ask is: WHAT IS IT THAT THINKS? Must a thought belong to a continuing thinker? When Descartes said `I think, therefore I am', what sort of an `I' did he prove the existence of?
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