Understanding Thought: Mental Processes and Problem Solving
The Nature of Thought and Intelligence
This section explores the contents of mental processes and how our minds solve problems and make decisions.
The Contents of Thought
Our thinking relies on mental representations. Perception, mental projection, and memory allow us to store information for later use.
Before proceeding, we must distinguish between types of mental representations. Cognitivist psychologists and philosophers identify two basic types: analog and symbolic representations. Analog representations capture real characteristics of what they represent. Symbolic representations, however, lack this direct relationship.
Consider a drawing of a mouse. The drawing consists of lines on paper and represents a mouse, but it is not a real mouse. Now consider the word “mouse.” The word, regardless of its design, has no physical similarity to the animal. It is an abstract representation. The relationship between the letters and the small animal is purely conventional. Human language operates with this abstraction.
Equally important are propositions. Concepts are the building blocks of thought. We combine them in different ways. In these propositions, a subject is joined to a predicate. In the modern era, philosophers like Locke and Hume thought that our concepts worked through associations. Today, we believe that the connections made by propositions are much more complex than simple associations.
The Power of Understanding in Philosophy
Since antiquity, philosophy has reflected on the role of understanding in the process of knowledge and idea generation.
Plato
Plato (fourth century BC) was among the first to address this problem. He viewed empirical experience as distancing knowledge from true reality, which he believed was the world of ideas. The world around us is merely a copy of the real world, which is immaterial and perfect. How does a human being gain knowledge? Through the memory of past lives. According to this theory, learning is remembering something we already knew. This implies the existence of innate knowledge in our minds, which we must bring forth through memory, dialectic, or the love of perfection. This theory initiated the concept of innate ideas, later embraced by rationalists.
Aristotle
For Aristotle (fourth century BC), understanding involves creating concepts from empirical experience through abstraction. This power of abstraction allows us to create definitions and connect concepts.
Empiricists
For the empiricists (Locke and Hume, XVII-XVIII century), understanding is reduced to the ability to associate ideas, thanks to memory, which retains sensory information and associates those feelings later. However, like Aristotle, understanding generates no new ideas. Empiricists are more radical, arguing that the “essence” or “concepts” are not valid knowledge because they are merely mental constructs with no direct contact with reality. They believe that only individual perceptions are certain (nominalism, phenomenalism).
Kant
Kant offers a radically different perspective. He argues that understanding provides non-empirical concepts, prior to experience, to unify knowledge from empirical reality. Kant calls these categories or “pure concepts,” differentiating them from Aristotle’s empirical concepts. A crucial category for physics is causality. Consider: “If Patrick drops his pen, it will fall to the ground.” This concept allows us to distinguish between cause and effect and connect them.
Philosophy of Language and Psychology
Today, the debate has shifted to psychology and linguistics: Are concepts innate, or do they all come from experience? According to Chomsky’s language theory, we are born with grammatical rules prior to any language teaching. This would explain the syntactic similarities between very different languages. Other authors (Fodor, Putnam) defend the empirical, a posteriori nature of language. Psychology conducts experiments on this topic, but none have been conclusive.