Thinking
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4 - Antony Flew: A Dictionary of Philosophy

The mental activity of

1. theoretical contemplation directed towards some object with a view to reaching a propositional conclusion.
2. practical deliberation directed towards some object with a view to reaching a decision to act.

Historically, there has been a wide variety of theories about what occurs in the process of thinking. For Descartes and Locke, the process involves bringing concepts or ideas before the mind; for Berkeley and Hume, the process constitutes a sequential series of ideas or images in the mind; for Hobbes, in an early version of a favoured modern view, the process is an activity that employs verbal images in a form of inner speech.
However, against this tendency to regard thinking as an essentially inner and conscious activity, Ryle and the behaviourists have argued that some states that may be described as thoughtful, contemplative, or deliberative are no more than dispositions to behave intelligently, dispositions which the agent may or may not articulate in words.

In contemporary philosophy, there are three main areas of concern with respect to the concept of thinking:

1. the conceptual and linguistically based nature of thought (the relation of thinking to the way in which objects are conceived and enter into the language);
2. the intentionality of thought (the way in which thought is necessarily directed towards an object);
3. the intensionality, or non-extensionality, of thought (the implications of the fact that a thought t about an object o implies nothing in respect either of the existence of o or the truth or falsity of t).