The Thinking - Part II
Posted on August 9, 2008 by Madalin Szemkovics
Filed Under Basics |
Thinking includes three component categories: contents (behavioral, semantics, figurative and symbolic), operations (evaluation, convergent thinking, divergent thinking, cognition and memory) and products (units, classes, relations, implications, systems and transformations).
The notion is a product of thinking, and yet, thinking is a system based on notions. This circular form ensures that as a process grows its abilities to analyze and generalize, the notions will also be more elaborated. Notions can be concrete (physical characteristics) or abstract (when they refer to properties detached from the physical support - ‘kindness’, ‘beauty’), individual (of one object), particular (of a group or class of objects) or general (properties common to a collection of groups).
The judgment is a complex informational structure which reflects the rapport between one object and another (”The cat is smaller than the dog”) or unveils some of its attributes (”Cats are lazy animals”). Also, it can state or deny properties, so it defines truth or false.
Reasoning is a discursive structure of information that starts from a certain information (hypothesis) and obtains other data (conclusion). It can be inductive, deductive or analogical, based on the type or number of judgments involved.
The operational component of thinking includes processes such as analysis (mentally decomposing an object and appreciating each part’s significance), comparison (highlighting properties based on a certain criteria), abstracting (retaining some characteristics and disposing of others), generalization (extending the result of a sinthesis to all the particular cases that are similar) and embedding (applying general notions, laws and principles in analyzing, interpreting and explaining reality).
Convergent thinking has the role of bringing diversity to unity, to synthetize the information. It becomes useful in forming notions, uncovering general laws by correllating different observations and putting them in schemes and conclusions. Divergent thinking is the exact opposite, being creative, explorative. It implies either reaching the same final product by different means, either the capacity of finding more than one solution to the same problem.
Thinking is also a process of understanding and issue solving. Understanding refers to the level of awareness one has to the world he lives in. It has crucial importance in the learning process, at school, as each item to be learned raises understanding difficulties, determined by the information’s novelty, structure and complexity. Issue solving focuses on surpassing information and cognitive obstacles (that’s what problems are), and is defined as the course thinking takes from point A - acknowledgement of the problem- to point B - applying of the resulted plan.
The significant differences between individuals regarding the organization of thinking lead psychologist to developing a thinking typology. They came up with thinking patterns and grouped them. Therefore, they say that there’s an analystic type, in which the use of analysis is predominant, a synthetic type, which focuses on synthesis, and so-on.
What we should all understand is that none of us is purely a certain type. We have all those abilities, just that some of them are more developed than others. The causes for their levels are both genetic and environmental; if genetically someone gets the potential to be a genius in mathematics, he won’t do anything in the domain if he won’t go to school, will he?
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