Thinking

Historical Antecedents to Contemporary Thinking Research

The study of thinking extends back over 2,000 years to Aristotle, who believed that it was the conscious activity of the mind, with thoughts being composed of images. Aristotle also pioneered the method of introspection to study thinking, a technique that was dominant in philosophy and psychology until the late 19th century. Aristotle's view that images are the foundation of thinking was central to the associationist accounts of the British Empiricist School of philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries. This view only became discredited when psychologists at the University of Wurzburg in the early 20th century demonstrated that image-based thoughts did not characterize the thinking of many participants, with some describing no discernible thoughts at all and others claiming their thoughts were indescribable and seemingly nonconscious.

Research in the 20th century further undermined the notion that thinking relates to conscious processing. Freudian theory advanced the idea of unconscious thinking as an essential determinant of behavior, while behaviorists such as J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner contended that all behavior, including thought, could be explained in terms of individuals learning to associate particular responses with particular stimuli when a reward was present that reinforced such links. From a behaviorist perspective, analyzing the conscious, “mentalistic” correlates of thinking was an irrelevance, with thinking instead being described as reflecting acquired habits and conditioned responses operating at a tacit level.

In the 1960s, the field of cognitive psychology emerged, with its basis in a new computational metaphor for the mind and a resurgence of interest in the mental processes underpinning thinking—an interest that continues unabated. Although the cognitive revolution meant that the study of thinking was back on the agenda as a legitimate area of inquiry, this approach made no commitment to the view that thinking is necessarily conscious and [Page 740]available for introspective access. Indeed, there has long been recognition amongst cognitive psychologists that implicit processes may dominate thinking, with only surface features emerging in the stream of consciousness. The cognitive perspective on thinking additionally avoids limiting such activity to humans, such that certain machines (e.g., artificial intelligence systems) can be viewed as engaging in thinking, as can certain animal species (e.g., higher order primates). Cognitive researchers have also tended to avoid treating human thinking as synonymous with notions of rationality, given abundant evidence that thinking often appears to be irrational and suboptimal. Finally, the cognitive approach brought with it a renewed interest in the mental representations underpinning thinking. Although the concept of images has featured in cognitive theorizing, a rather different concept has burgeoned over the past 30 years, which is the idea espoused by Philip Johnson-Laird that thinking is based on the construction and manipulation of abstract “mental models” of possible situations.

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