THINKING

Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end. Thinking is important to all of us in our daily lives. The way we think affects the way we plan our lives, the personal goals we choose, and the decisions we make. Good thinking is therefore not something that is forced upon us in school: It is something that we all want to do, and want others to do, to achieve our goals and theirs. More generally, how do people use information to devise innovative solutions to problems? And how do people think about, understand, and, through language, describe the world?

What Is Thinking?
Beliefs We can start to answer this question by looking at the various ways the word thinking is used in everyday language. 1. I think that water is necessary for life and 2. George thinks the Pope is a communist both express beliefs (of varying degrees of apparent plausibility), that is, explicit claims of what someone takes to be a truth about the world.3. Anne is sure to think of a solution carries us into the realm of problem solving, the mental construction of an action plan to achieve a goal. The complaint 4. Why didnt you think before you went ahead with your halfbaked scheme? emphasizes that thinking can be a kind of foresight, a way of seeing the possible future. 5 What do you think about it? calls for a judgment, an assessment of the desirability of an option. Then theres 6. Albert is lost in thought, where thinking becomes some sort of mental meadow through which a person might meander on a rainy afternoon, oblivious to the world outside. Rips and Conrad (1989) elicited judgments from college students about how various mentalistic terms relate to one another. Using statistical techniques, the investigators were able to summarize these relationships in two diagrams, shown in Figure 1 .1 . Figure 1 .1(A) is a hierarchy of kinds, or categories. Roughly, people believe planning is a kind of deciding, which is a kind of reasoning, which is a kind of conceptualizing, which is a kind of thinking. People also believe that thinking is part of conceptualizing, which is part of remembering, which is part of reasoning, and so on [Figure 1 .1 (B)]. The kinds ordering and the parts ordering are similar; most strikingly, thinking is the most general term in both orderings the grand super ordinate of mental activities, which permeates all the others.

It is not easy to make the move from the free flow of everyday speech to scientific definitions of mental terms, but let us nonetheless offer a preliminary definition of thinking to suggest what this book is about: Thinking is the systematic transformation of mental representations of knowledge to characterize actual or possible states of the world, often in service of goals. Obviously, our definition introduces a plethora of terms with meanings that beg to be unpacked, but at which we can only hint. A mental representation of knowledge is an internal description that can be manipulated to form other descriptions. To count as thinking, the manipulations must be systematic transformations governed by certain constraints. Whether a logical deduction or a creative leap, what we mean by thinking is more than unconstrained associations (with the caveat that thinking may indeed be disordered; see Bachman & Cannon, Chap. 21 ). The internal representations created by thinking describe states of some external world (a world that may include the thinker as an object of self-reflection) that world might be our everyday one, or perhaps some imaginary construction obeying the laws of magical realism. Often (not always the daydreamer, and indeed the night dreamer, are also thinkers), thinking is directed toward achieving some desired state of affairs, some goal that motivates the thinker to perform mental work. Our definition thus includes quite a few stipulations, but notice also what is left out. We do not claim that thinking necessarily requires a human (higher-order primates, and perhaps some other species on this or other planets, have a claim to be considered thinkers) (see Call & Tomasello, Chap. 25) or even a sentient being. (The field of artificial intelligence may have been a disappointment in its first half-century, but we are reluctant to define it away as an oxymoron.) Nonetheless, our focus in this book is on thinking by hominids with electrochemically powered brains. Thinking often seems to be a conscious activity of which the thinker is aware (cogito, ergo sum); however, consciousness is a thorny philosophical puzzle, and some mental activities seem pretty much like thinking, except for being implicit rather than explicit (see Litman & Reber, Chap. 18). Finally, we do not claim that thinking is inherently rational, optimal, desirable, or even smart. A thorough history of human thinking will include quite a few chapters on stupidity. The study of thinking includes several interrelated subfields that reflect slightly different perspectives on thinking. Reasoning, which has a long tradition that springs from philosophy and logic, places emphasis on the process of drawing inferences (conclusions) from some initial information (premises). In standard logic, an inference is deductive if the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion by virtue of the argument form. If the truth of the premises renders the truth of the conclusion more credible but does not bestow certainty, the inference is called inductive.2 Judgment and decision making involve assessment of the value of an option or the probability that it will yield a certain payoff (judgment) coupled with choice among alternatives (decision making). Problem solving involves the construction of a course of action that can achieve a goal. Although these distinct perspectives on thinking are useful in organizing the field (and this volume), these aspects of thinking overlap in every conceivable way. To solve a problem, one is likely to reason about the consequences of possible actions and make decisions to select among alternative actions. A logic problem, as the name implies, is a problem to be solved (with the goal of deriving or evaluating a possible conclusion). Making a decision is often a problem that requires reasoning. These subdivisions of the field, like our preliminary definition of thinking, should be treated as guideposts, not destinations.

Thinking in a broad sense that includes most of the various mental phenomena. By thinking we usually mean such activities as calculating, cogitating, pondering, musing, reflecting, meditating, and ruminating. But we might also mean any of a broader range of actions or activities (or dispositions, states, processes, or whatever). I mean remembering, intending, imagining, conceiving, believing, desiring, hoping, feeling emotion, empathizing, following what someone is saying, minding, being conscious of something, and so on. This is admittedly a mixed bag. It might seem that feeling, in particular, should be separated out. Certainly thinking and feeling can be contrasted, but in the context of this book it is what they have in common that is interesting. Anyway, I would like to include all the above as thinking. The general term most philosophers would use is mental phenomena, but, for various reasons, I want to try to do without it. We can use thinking instead. The notion of thinking helps us to explain peoples behavior. We appeal to thinking to explain actions, qualities of action, abilities and dispositions to act, and even certain kinds of bodily agitation. Consider the distinctive posture of Rodins Penseur, an attentive and methodical performance, any goal-directed activity, explaining to someone what one is doing, producing a list of relevant facts, finding the solution to a problem of woodworking or arithmetic, having a disposition to racist remarks or effusive greetings, and trembling or blushing at what someone is saying. We explain these different behaviors and aspects of behavior, and many others, by positing different kinds of thinking going on behind the scenes. The thinking determines the nature of the behavior, then motivates and guides its performance, from within. What kind of thing is thinking? Is it a mental process? Is it a physiological process in the brain? Is it both? Or is it something different again an action or activity the person performs?

When we think, we perceive, classify, manipulate, and combine information. When we are finished, we know something we did not know before (although our knowledge may be incorrect). The conventional assumption is that the concept of an action includes and presupposes concepts of mental phenomenabeliefs, desires, decisions, intentions, volitions, etc.and that these latter are concepts of a fundamentally non-action kind.

Cognitive Science A few decades ago, when the science of cognition was in its infancy, the early textbooks on cognition began with perception and attention and ended with memory. So called higher-level cognition the mysterious, complicated realm of thinking and reasoning was simply left out. Things have changed any good cognitive text (and there are many) devotes several chapters to topics such as categorization, inductive and deductive reasoning, judgment and decision making, and problem solving. What has still been missing, however, is a true handbook for the field of

thinking and reasoning a book meant to be kept close at hand by those involved in the field. Such a book would bring together top researchers to write chapters, each of which summarizes the basic concepts and findings for a major topic, sketches its history, and provides a sense of the directions in which research is currently heading. This handbook would provide quick overviews for experts in each topic area, and more importantly for experts in allied topic areas (because few researchers can keep up with the scientific literature over the full breadth of the field of thinking and reasoning). Even more crucially, this handbook would provide an entry point into the field for the next generation of researchers by providing a text for use in classes on thinking and reasoning designed for graduate students and upper-level undergraduates. Cognition refers to mentally processing information. Our thoughts take many forms, including daydreaming, problem solving, and reasoning (to name but a few). Answers to these questions are posed by cognitive psychology, the branch of psychology that focuses on the study of higher mental processes, including thinking, language, memory, problem solving, knowing, reasoning, judging, and decision making. Clearly, the realm of cognitive psychology is broad. No other species contemplates, analyzes, recollects, or plans the way humans do. Understanding what thinking is, however, goes beyond knowing that we think. Philosophers, for example, have argued for generations about the meaning of thinking, with some placing it at the core of human beings understanding of their own existence. Psychologists define thinking as the manipulation of mental representations of information. A representation may take the form of a word, a visual image, a sound, or data in any other sensory modality stored in memory. Thinking transforms a particular representation of information into new and different forms, allowing us to answer questions, solve problems, or reach goals.

According to the currently dominant theory as to the nature of thinking, thinking is the brains computer-like processing of mental representations.The brain acquires information about reality via the sense organs and encodes it into neural form as mental representations. The brain stores each representation and computes from itand from other current and previously stored representationsa program of neuron firings that will produce a behavioral response appropriate to the current situation. This representational and computational understanding of the mind/brain is the basis of cognitive science, the approach to psychology and philosophy of mind that took over from behaviorism in the mid 1970s.1

Then thinking is
a. process that goes on inside peoples heads, b. a kind of action, something the person actively does. This approach gives a special meaning to the term rational. Rational does not mean, here, a kind of thinking that denies emotions and desires: It means, the kind of thinking we would all want to do, if we were aware of our own best interests, in order to achieve our goals. People want to think rationally, in this sense. It does not make much sense to say that you do not want to do something that will help you achieve your goals: Your goals are, by definition, what you want to achieve. They are the criteria by which you evaluate everything about your life. We think when we are in doubt about 1. how to act, 2. what to believe, or 3. what to desire. Basic types of thinking

1. thinking about decisions, 2. thinking about beliefs, and 3.thinking about our goals themselves. We think when we are in doubt about how to act, what to believe, or what to desire. In these situations, thinking helps us to resolve our doubts: It is purposive. We have to think when we make decisions, when we form beliefs, and when we choose our personal goals, and we will be better off later if we think well in these situations. thinking about decisions A decision is a choice of action of what to do or not do. Decisions are made to achieve goals, and they are based on beliefs about what actions will achieve the goals. For example, if I believe it is going to rain, and if my goal is to keep dry, I will carry an umbrella. Decisions may attempt to satisfy the goals of others as well as the selfish goals of the decision maker. I may carry an extra umbrella for a friend.

Decisions depend on beliefs and goals. When we think about belief, we think to decide how strongly to believe something, or which of several competing beliefs is true. When we believe a proposition, we tend to act as if it were true. If I believe it will rain, I will carry my umbrella. We may express beliefs in language, even without acting on them ourselves. (Others may act on the beliefs we express.) Many school problems, such as those in mathematics, involve thinking about beliefs that we express in language only, not in actions. Beliefs may vary in strength, and they may be quantified as probabilities. A decision to go out of my way to buy an umbrella requires a stronger belief that it will rain (a higher probability) than a decision to carry an umbrella I already own.

When we decide on a personal goal, we make a decision that affects future decisions. If a person decides to pursue a certain career, the pursuit of that career becomes a goal that many future decisions will seek to achieve. When we choose personal goals by thinking, we also try to bind our future behavior. Personal goals of this sort require self-control.

Types of thinking to reach our goals

In these situations, thinking helps us to resolve our doubts: It is purposive. We have to think when we 1. make decisions, 2. when we form beliefs, 3. and when we choose our personal goals, and we will be better off later if we think well in these situations. A decision is a choice of action of what to do or not do. Decisions are made to 1. achieve goals, 2. and they are based on beliefs about what actions will achieve the goals. For example, if I believe it is going to rain, and if my goal is to keep dry, I will carry an umbrella. Decisions may attempt to satisfy the goals of others as well as the selfish goals of the decision maker. I may carry an extra umbrella for a friend. Decisions may concern small matters, such as 1. whether to carry an umbrella, 2. or matters of enormous importance, such as how one government should respond to a provocation by another. Decisions may be simple, involving only a single goal, two options, and strong beliefs about which option will best achieve the goal, or they may be complex, with many goals and options and with uncertain beliefs. When we decide on a personal goal, we make a decision that affects future decisions. If a person decides to pursue a certain career, the pursuit of that career becomes a goal that many future decisions will seek to achieve. When we choose personal goals by thinking, we also try to bind our future behavior. Personal goals of this sort require self-control. Let us take a simple example of a decision. Suppose you are a college student trying to decide which courses you will take next term. Most of the courses you have scheduled are required for

your major, but you have room for one elective. The question that starts your thinking is simply this: Which course should I take? You begin by saying to a friend, I have a free course. Any ideas? She says that she enjoyed Professor Smiths course in Soviet-American relations. You think that the subject sounds interesting, and you want to know more about modern history. You ask her about the work, and she says that there is a lot of reading and a twenty page paper. You think about all the computerscience assignments you are going to have this term, and, realizing that you were hoping for an easier course, you resolve to look elsewhere. You then recall hearing about a course in American history since World War II. That has the same advantages as the first courseit sounds interesting and it is about modern history but you think the work might not be so hard. You try to find someone who has taken the course. Clearly, we could go on with this example, but it already shows the main characteristics of thinking. It begins with doubt. It involves a search directed at removing the doubt. Thinking is, in a way, like exploration. In the course of the search, you discovered two possible courses, some good features of both courses, some bad features of one course, and some goals you are trying to achieve. You also made an inference: You rejected the first course because the work was too hard.

Thinking about beliefs

The search-inference framework applies to thinking about beliefs as well as thinking about decisions. When we think about beliefs, we make decisions to strengthen or weaken possible beliefs. One goal is to bring our beliefs into line with the evidence. (Sometimes we have other goals as wellfor example, the goal of believing certain things, regardless of their fit with the evidence.) Roughly, beliefs that are most in line with the evidence are beliefs that correspond best with the world as it is. They are beliefs that are most likely to be true. If a belief is true, and if we hold it because we have found the right evidence and made the right inferences, we can be said to know something.1 Hence, thinking about beliefs can lead to knowledge.

Goals are the criteria by which you evaluate the possibilities. Three goals have been mentioned in our example: your desire for an interesting course; your feeling that you ought to know something about recent history; and your desire to keep your work load manageable. Some goals are usually present at the time when thinking begins. In this case, only the goal of finding a course is present, and it is an insufficient goal, because it does not help you to distinguish among the possibilities, the various courses you could take. Additional goals must be sought. The objects of thinking are represented in our minds. We are conscious of them. If they are not in our immediate consciousness, we can recall them when they are relevant, even after an episode of thinking resumes following an interruption. The processes of thinking the search for possibilities, evidence, and goals and the inference from the evidence to evaluate the possibilitiesdo not occur in any fixed order. They overlap. The thinker alternates from one to another.

Why just these phases: the search for possibilities, evidence, and goals, and inference? Thinking is, in its most general sense, a method of finding and choosing among potential possibilities, that is, possible actions, beliefs, or personal goals. For any choice, there must be purposes or goals, and goals can be added to or removed from the list. I can search for (or be open to) new goals; therefore, search for goals is always possible. There must also be objects that can be brought to bear on the choice among possibilities. Hence, there must be evidence, and it can always be sought. Finally, the evidence must be used, or it might as well not have been gathered. These phases are necessary in this sense.

Thinking
Descriptive, normative, and prescriptive
Descriptive Descriptive models are theories about how people normally think for example, how we solve problems in logic or how we make decisions. Other descriptive models are mathematical, describing functional relationships between inputs (such as probabilities) and outputs (such as choices or judgments). Normative models evaluate thinking and decision making in terms of the personal goals of the thinker or thinkers. For decision making, the normative model consists of the policy that will, in the long run, achieve these goals to the greatest extent. Such a model takes into account the probability that a given act (for example, leaving my umbrella at home) will bring about a certain outcome (my getting wet) and the relative desirability of that outcome according to the decision makers personal goals. It is not enough simply to say that the normative model is the decision that leads to the best outcome (carrying an umbrella only when it will rain). We need a way of evaluating decisions at the time they are made, so that we can give prescriptive advice to the decision maker who is not clairvoyant. Prescriptive models are simple models that prescribe or state how we ought to think. Teachers are highly aware of prescriptive models and try to get their students to conform to them, not just in thinking but also in writing, reading, and mathematics. For example, there are many good prescriptive models of composition in books on style. There may, of course, be more than one right way to think (or write). There may also be good ways that are not quite the best. A good teacher encourages students to think (or write) in better ways rather than worse ones. Humans are highly adaptable creatures. We live in deserts, jungles, mountains, frenzied cities, placid retreats, and space stations. Unlike other species, our success owes more to thinking abilities and intelligence than it does to physical strength or speed.

Some Basic Units of Thought At its most basic, thinking is an internal representation (mental expression) of a problem or situation. Picture a chess player who mentally tries out several moves before actually touching a chess piece. By planning her moves, she can avoid many mistakes. Imagine planning what to study for an exam, what to say at a job interview, or how to get to your spring break hotel. In each of these cases, imagine what might happen if you couldnt plan at all. The basic units of thought are :1. images, 2. concepts, 3 and language (or symbols). Images are picture-like mental representations. Concepts are ideas that represent categories of objects or events. Language consists of words or symbols, and rules for combining them.

Be aware, however, that thinking involves attention, pattern recognition, memory, decisionmaking, intuition, knowledge, and more.

Mental Imagery
Almost everyone has visual and auditory images. More than half of us have imagery for movement, touch, taste, smell, and pain. Thus, mental images are sometimes more than just pictures. For example, your image of a bakery may also include its delicious odor.Most of us use images to think, remember, and solve problems. For instance, we may use mental images to; Make a decision or solve a problem (choosing what clothes to wear; figuring out how to arrange furniture in a room). Change feelings (thinking of pleasant images to get out of a bad mood; imagining yourself as thin to stay on a diet). Improve a skill or prepare for some action (using images to improve a tennis stroke; mentally rehearsing how you will ask for a raise). Aid memory (picturing Mr. Cook wearing a chef s hat, so you scan remember his name). Concepts Have you ever visited a new place only to feel like you had been there before? Or had a conversation with someone and felt the experience was uncannily familiar? If so, you have experienced a phenomenon known as dj vu (from the French for seen before). The term refers to the strange sense that your present experience matches a previous experience, even though you cannot retrieve the explicit memory. This feeling reflects the brains ability to treat new stimuli as instances of familiar categories, even if the stimuli are slightly different from anything it has encountered before. Why is that important? Imagine what life would be like if, every time we started a new class in school, for example, we couldnt access any of our previous school experiences, so we had to start from scratch to figure out what to do, how to study, and what the point of school even was. This ability to assimilate experiences, objects, or ideas into

familiar mental categoriesand take the same action toward them or give them the same label is one of the most basic attributes of thinking organisms.

A concept is an idea that represents a category of objects or events. Concepts help us identify important features of the world. Thats why experts in various areas of knowledge are good at classifying objects. Bird watchers, tropical fish fanciers, 5-year-old dinosaur enthusiasts, and other experts all learn to look for identifying details that beginners tend to miss. If you are knowledgeable about a topic, such as horses, flowers, or football, you literally see things differently than less well-informed people do.

The mental categories we form in this way are known as concepts. We use them as the building blocks of thinking because they help us organize our knowledge. Concepts can represent classes of objects such as chair or food, living organisms such as birds or buffaloes, or events like birthday parties. They may also represent properties (such as red or large), abstractions (such as truth or love), relations (such as smarter than), procedures (such as how to tie your shoes), or intentions (such as the intention to break into a conversation). But because concepts are mental structures, we cannot observe them directly. For the cognitive scientist, this means inferring concepts from their influence on behavior or on brain activity. For example, you cannot be sure another person shares your concept of fun, but you can observe whether he or she responds the same way you do to stimuli you interpret as fun. Everyone conceptualizes the world in a unique way, so our concepts define who we are. Yet, behind this individual uniqueness lie similarities in the ways we all form concepts. In particular, we all distinguish between natural concepts and artificial concepts. Natural concepts are imprecise mental categories that develop out of our everyday experiences in the world. You possess a natural concept of bird based on your experiences with birds, which in turn invokes a mental prototype, a generic image representing a typical bird from your experience. To determine whether an object is a bird or not, you mentally compare it to your bird prototypeand the closer it matches, the quicker you can make your decision. Most people take less time to recognize an eagle as a bird than a penguin. Our personal prototypes encompass all kinds of natural concepts, including friendship, intimacy. And, for all these, one persons prototype might differ from that of someone else, which can create the basis for misunderstanding in our relationships. Natural concepts are sometimes called fuzzy concepts because of their imprecision.

Types of Concepts
Are there different kinds of concepts? Yes, conjunctive concepts, or and concepts, are defined by the presence of two or more features. In other words, an item must have this feature and this feature and this feature. For example, a motorcycle must have two wheels and an engine and handlebars. Relational concepts are based on how an object relates to something else, or how its features relate to one another. All of the following are relational concepts: larger, above, left, north, and upside down. Another example is brother, which is defined as a male considered in his relation to another person having the same parents. Disjunctive concepts have at least one of several possible features. These are either/or concepts. To belong to the category, an item must have this feature or that feature or another feature. For example, in baseball, a strike is either a swing and a miss or a pitch over the plate or a foul ball. The either/or quality of disjunctive concepts makes them hard to learn. Solving a math problem, deciding what to do Friday night, and indulging a private fantasy all require thinking. We can conceive of thinking as a complex act of cognition information processing in the brainby which we deal with our world of ideas, feelings, desires, and experience. Our Core Concept notes that this information can come from within and from without, but it always involves some form of mental representation: These mental representations, then, serve as the building blocks of cognition, while thinking organizes them in meaningful ways. The ultimate results are the higher thought processes we call reasoning, imagining, judging, deciding, problem solving, expertise, creativity, and sometimesgenius.

THE LANGUAGES OF THE MIND

Are ideas shaped differently when communicated through graphic, musical, or verbal languages? Or is there a uniform relationship between internal representation and external ordering across different modalities of thoughtful expression? Visual Thinking "To draw is to put down your thoughts visually," Language is a highly conventionalized form of expression, but imagesthe constituent forms of visual thoughtare hard to standardize or to define. There is no dictionary of images, or thesaurus of photographs and paintings. Imagery and visual expressions reflect the uniqueness of

an individual's life. Nevertheless, images have intrigued the students of the mind since the beginnings of recorded history.

Verbal Thinking
A thought may be compared to a cloud shedding a shower of words. It is by means of language that poets, writers, and philosophers, who are driven by the need to think beyond the limits of the known, have attempted to share with others their personal inquiries. While film and the graphic media lend themselves well to the fluidity of experience, words are frequently used to explore some of the more universal aspects of existence. Language is a bridge between individuals who wish to overcome divisions born of the diversity of human experience. It is also a bridge between inner thought and shared understanding: the past and the present, the world of the senses and the realm of thought. The differing forms of language reveal these different uses. Writing is an explicit and expanded form usually addressed to distant or unknown audiences. Inner speech, on the other hand, is directed inward, toward the self. It is a highly condensed language of thought where each word may stand for manifold ideas.

The Languages of Emotion

In examining the nature of creative thought, many psychologists and psychiatrists have chosen music as their focus. He considered music to be one of these abilities, de- scribing it as "an autonomous intellectual realm." music as the language of emotion. In view of the great richness of the treatment of music in the literature of thought and creativity.

Scientific Thinking
The apprenticeships of artists are individually constructed times of learning, while young scientists-in-the-making follow a more formal and structured process of socialization. But in both art and science, individuals bring their minds trained from childhood and their creative intensity to the challenging tasks of extending knowledge. The full mastery of the scientific methods of thinking, though, is not easily accomplished. While classroom lessons are an essential part of the apprenticeship process, the emerging scientist gains further insights into his or her future work by reading and by sharing knowledge with peers and with mentors. In the sciences, the urge for understanding and for intellectual adventure motivate most young people. The French-American biologist, Rene Dubos, wrote that his first contact with scientific adventure was made in reading the work of Jules Verne:

I am sure that his stories could not instill valid knowledge or critical judgment or scientific spirit in anyone, but they can certainly foster a taste for the unknown and a desire for adventure. Curiosity and passion are maintained and renewed in the course of a scientist's career through the pleasures of discovery and through the use of varied kinds of thought when confronted with a new and intriguing problem. Some scientists identify visual processes as crucial to their thinking, while others emphasize metaphoric or mathematical processes.

The Creativity of Thinking

P r o b l e m Solving Concepts tell us what we think about but not why we think. Why do we bother to engage in the mental effort of thinking? Problem solving means finding an appropriate way to attain a goal when the goal is not readily available. Problem solving entails following several steps and overcoming mental obstacles. Find and Frame Problems; Recognizing a problem is the first step toward a solution (Mayer, 2000). Finding and framing problems involves asking questions in creative ways and seeing what others do not. The ability to recognize and frame a problem is difficult to learn. Furthermore, many real-world problems are ill-defined or vague and have no clear-cut solutions. Th e visionaries who developed the many inventions that influence our daily lives, such as the computer, telephone, and light bulb, all saw problems that everyone else was content to live with. Recognizing problems involves being aware of and open to experiences (two mental habits we will examine later). It also means listening carefully to that voice in your head that occasionally sighs, There must be a better way. Develop Good Problem-Solving Strategies Once we find a problem and clearly define it, we need to develop strategies for solving it. Among the effective strategies are sub goals, algorithms, and heuristics. Subgoals Are intermediate goals or intermediate problems that put us in a better position for reaching a fi nal goal or solution. Imagine that you are writing a paper for a psychology class. What are some subgoaling strategies for approaching this task? One might be locating the right books and research journals on your chosen topic. At the same time that you are searching for the right publications, you will likely benefit from establishing some sub goals within your time frame for completing the project. If the paper is due in two months, you might set a subgoal of a fi rst draft of the paper two weeks before it is due, another sub goal of completing your reading for the

paper one month before it is due, and still another sub goal of starting your library research tomorrow. Notice that in establishing the sub goals for meeting the deadline, you worked backward. Working backward in establishing sub goals is a good strategy. You first create the subgoal that is closest to the final goal and then work backward to the subgoal that is closest to the beginning of the problem-solving effort. Algorithms Algorithms are strategies that guarantee a solution to a problem. Algorithms come in diff erent forms, such as formulas, instructions, and the testing of all possible solutions. We use algorithms in cooking (by following a recipe) and driving (by following directions to an address). Heuristics are such shortcut strategies or guidelines that suggest a solution to a problem but do not guarantee an answer. Evaluate Solutions Once we think we have solved a problem, we will not know how effective our solution is until we find out if it works. It helps to have in mind a clear criterion for the effectiveness of the solution. Thinking is important to all of us in our daily lives. The way we think affects the way we plan our lives, the personal goals we choose, and the decisions we make. Good thinking is therefore not something that is forced upon us in school: It is something that we all want to do, and want others to do, to achieve our goals and theirs. This approach gives a special meaning to the term rational. Rational does not mean, here, a kind of thinking that denies emotions and desires: It means, the kind of thinking we would all want to do, if we were aware of our own best interests, in order to achieve our goals. People want to think rationally, in this sense. It does not make much sense to say that you do not want to do something that will help you achieve your goals: Your goals are, by definition, what you want to achieve. They are the criteria by which you evaluate everything about your life.

Its fashionable to claim that we should trust our gut, rely on our intuitions, and stop thinking too much. How is explicit human thinking different from the goal-directed intelligence of animals? How does our own ability to come to quick, intuitive decisionsoften mediated by unreflective emotional responsesrelate to reflective thought? There are many words associated with what is, loosely, termed 'thinking'. We are often told to 'think about the issues', to 'analyse in more depth', to 'use reasoning', or to 'be rational'. Often students are told that they must think 'critically' if they are to succeed. When people write essays or reports, they are usually advised to make sure that they have a good 'argument' or that they 'explain in detail'.

Smart thinking means knowing how to:

work out and express your main ideas plan your communication of ideas so that they can be clearly understood check to see if you have covered all the important parts of your topic establish a framework or structure in which your basic facts and evidence make sense present ideas by linking them together to convince readers of your conclusion.

Thinking is of
1. reasoning 2. Judgment 3. decision making

1. Reasoning is concerned with making inferences 2. judgment is about the formation of beliefs about the likelihood of uncertain events 3. decision making is about choosing between alternatives.s reasoning, the key underlying process of thinking, let's consider some common 'informal' ideas about thinking. Ask questions (of ourselves and others) Seek out information Make connections Interpret and evaluate

Reasoning
Reasoning represents one of the great advances that human beings have made in their ability to understand and make sense of the world. It has been described as a 'complex weave of abilities that help you get someone else's point, explain a complicated idea, generate reasons for your viewpoints, evaluate the reasons given by others, decide what information to accept or reject, see the pros as well as the cons and so forth'.3 Yet it is also the case that reasoning does not come naturally but must be learnt and can be improved. Human beings engage in a kind of thinking that requires consideration of hypothetical possibilities. For example, we may imagine a possible world resulting from some action or choice that is before us.We may entertain an hypothesis and consider its implications, or we may attempt to forecast the most plausible states of affairs given some scenario. Hypothetical thinking, we assume, is a uniquely human facility that is a distinguishing characteristic of our intelligence. Reasoning is something we already do: all of us have learnt, in one way or another, to think and to reason, to make connections and see relationships between various events and attitudes in our world. The things, then, that we do with reasoning, as a form of communication, are: arguing ('You should not believe what you see on television because ... ') explaining ('Digital television has been introduced because ... ') making decisions C I think we should buy a digital television receiver because ... ') predicting the future ('I expect digital television to make pay television better because ... ') exploring issues ('How will digital television link to the Internet?')

 finding answers ('Why did the government decide on a higher-quality digital television standard?') justifying actions ('When first introduced, I thought subscribing to pay television was not a good idea because ... ' ). So, smart thinking is about reasoning, which is about the use and communication of knowledge. Researching, reading, analysing, testing, checking, planning, and writing all depend on understanding those interrelationships. Once you understand that knowledge consists of innumerable interrelations between small 'bits' of information, then you will be able to find, shape, and use knowledge for yourself. But reasoning is also about people: the authors and audiences of arguments, explanations, and so on. And it is in relation to the human, social aspect of reasoning that we must really be 'smart'. Reasoning is not just formal logic; nor is it an abstract way of thinking about ideas. It is always a social act. People always use reasoning for particular purposes (be they economic, political, or whatever). They all have different perspectives on the issues being debated. Their age, class, race, gender, and ethnicity all influence the broad structures upon which they rely in reasoning. If we forget that reasoning has this social aspect, then we will run the risk of failing to think effectively. The connections and relations between ideas, events, proposals, and so on only become meaningful in the context of how, when, where, and why they are communicated with
others.

THE ABOVE MATERIAL IS PREPARED FOR THE POST GRADUATE STUDENTS OF PSYCHOLOGY AS NOTES IN INDIAN UNIVERSITIES