Two Ways to Think about Thought

We can characterise thought in two different ways. Which is preferred can have implications for important issues about reasoning and the norms that govern cognition. The first, which owes much to the picture of the mind encountered in Descartes' Meditations, observes that paradigmatic examples of thoughts and inferences are events and processes whose special characteristics stem from their being ‘mental’ occurrences. For example they are conscious or, if unconscious, they stand in some special relation to thought processes that are conscious. They typically involve attitudes towards contents or propositions. In general, thoughts have a distinctive ontological status and this status depends upon their being mental and typically conscious. The second emphasises that thought is a kind of activity with a definite function. It involves the use of intelligence to solve problems, answer questions, make plans and so on. Thought should be studied as a kind of goal-directed activity. Those interested in the norms that govern thought should attend to the role of responsible disciplined reflection in carrying out this activity.

The first (‘Cartesian’) view is typical of much recent philosophy of mind. It assumes that an examination of the varieties of mental representations provides us with a vocabulary for describing and explaining thought processes. The second (‘problem-solving’) approach is more common in epistemology and the philosophy of science. Popperians, for example, emphasise the role of public critical discussion in the advance of knowledge and refuse to place those processes of reasoning that are ‘internal’ to a single consciousness at the centre of their epistemologies; and others may stress the role of public activities such as experimentation in the process of thought.